A pair of Bitcoin wallets that had remained inactive for upwards of 16 years transferred 100 BTC on Friday morning, valued at roughly $6.89 million, based on onchain data.
The first wallet transferred nearly 50 BTC to one destination and 0.01 BTC to another at 4:08 a.m. UTC. Just over two minutes later, the second wallet transferred nearly 49 BTC to a destination and 1 BTC to another. Both batches of digital assets originated from block rewards minted back in September 2010, according to data from blockchain explorer Mempool. Onchain tracking service Whale Alert initially highlighted the transactions, calculating that each 50 BTC reward carried a value of approximately $3 upon being received in 2010.
By 4:48 a.m. UTC, roughly 20 BTC originating from the initial transfer and 39 BTC from the subsequent one were consolidated into a fresh address beginning with “bc1qj5.” Roughly 30 BTC rests in another new address beginning with “bc1qqs,” 10 BTC in “bc1qds,” and 1 BTC in “bc1qce” at the time of publication.
The motivation behind these movements, the identity of the account holders, and whether the two original outputs shared a single owner continue to be unknown.
With bitcoin Bitcoin (BTC) currently changing hands at approximately $69,000, as reported by The Block’s pricing page, the worth of the transferred bitcoin has surged by more than 1.15 million times since 2010.
Early Bitcoin mining rewards
Mempool categorizes both 50 BTC inputs as pay-to-public-key, or P2PK. The four addresses that received the funds on Friday all begin with bc1q, a prefix utilized by modern native SegWit (P2WPKH) addresses. Older Bitcoin addresses comprise pay-to-public-key-hash (P2PKH) addresses starting with 1 alongside pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) addresses beginning with 3. The newest Taproot (P2TR) address format begins with bc1p.
Additional early bitcoin holdings have migrated to modern address structures following prolonged periods of inactivity, and multiple addresses cited in a New York legal dispute concerning allegedly abandoned bitcoin have shifted assets recently after plaintiffs issued onchain notices.
Five 50 BTC block rewards generated in April 2010 sat untouched for roughly 15 years before being transferred to two SegWit addresses in July 2025. Those coins were valued at approximately $29.6 million at the time. A transaction in March 2024 merged 40 mining rewards dating back to 2010, summing up to 2,000 BTC valued at nearly $140 million.
Originally published at https://www.theblock.co/news/markets/2026-11-13-from-6-to-6-9-million-two-dormant-bitcoin-addresses-wake-up-to-move-100-btc-after-more-than-16-years-439698.
