On October 7, Galaxy Research announced that 100 bitcoins mined in July 2010 had become active after remaining dormant for 16 years, 2 months, and 24 days. The coins were transferred to two separate wallets, with 90 BTC sent to one address and 10 BTC to another.
The bitcoins were originally stored in a Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) address and have now been moved to Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) wallets. The new wallets remain unidentified and show no known counterparties.
Verification and Historical Context
Bitcoin.com News independently verified Galaxy Research's findings using analytical tools, confirming that the coins originated from coinbase rewards mined on July 13, 2010, and had remained untouched since that time. Galaxy Research noted that the holding represents a gain of 108.69 million percent from the coin's near-zero value in 2010.
While the wallet address had been used for other transactions, moving around 894 BTC in transfers during 2015, 2017, and 2018, these specific unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) had not moved until now. Galaxy Research clarified that it tracks individual coins using a complete ledger of every UTXO and their historical movements, totaling approximately 1.7 terabytes of data.
The coins are believed to have been mined during the era when Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto was actively mining on the network.
