Movements of bitcoin cash (BCH) took place amid the mysterious transfers of $8.5 billion worth of ‘Satoshi-era’ bitcoin late Friday.
Conor Grogan, a director at Coinbase, flagged a suspicious BCH transaction of over 10,000 tokens (worth nearly $5 million at current prices) tied to one of the whale wallets hours before the main transfers began.
The move raised the possibility that someone may have gained access to legacy private keys and quietly tested them before initiating the massive BTC movements.
“There is a possibility that the owner was testing the private key in a way that wouldn’t get noticed,” Grogan posted on X. “BCH isn’t monitored heavily by whale-watching services.”
Eight wallets that had been dormant since 2011 each transferred 10,000 BTC to new SegWit addresses on Friday, over 14 years after initially receiving bitcoin in what is now colloquially known as the network’s “Satoshi era.”
None of the wallets have, so far, been linked to any known entity or company, but the timing, scale, and manual nature of the transfers have set off alarm bells.
Grogan pointed out that only one BCH address associated with the BTC cluster was touched. “Why not sweep the others?” he asked. “It implies the actor may not have full access.”
But the timing is uncanny: just one hour after the BCH test transfer, the first of the 80,000 BTC started to move — triggering the largest Satoshi-era bitcoin movements ever recorded.
So far, the new bitcoin addresses haven’t forwarded funds further or deposited them on exchanges. But the BCH test could indicate someone was probing before executing a coordinated transfer, possibly to avoid triggering whale alerts or spooking the market.
Other theories extend from a private key leak to even a quantum computing attack.
Bitcoin’s early addresses, especially Pay‑to‑Public‑Key (P2PK) formats, expose public keys after their first transaction — once available, they become theoretically crackable using Shor’s algorithm if large-scale quantum hardware materializes.
(Dormant wallets that have never revealed their public key are safe even in a quantum future as no public key exists to reverse-engineer.)
As such, the fact that only one associated BCH wallet moved during testing while the others remained untouched suggests limited access.