$540M Bitcoin, With Suspected Links To Hack, Moved After 7 Years

Several wallet addresses that were dormant for a long time moved $540 million worth of Bitcoin BTC/USD in a series of 11 transactions identified by WhaleAlert on Tuesday.

What Happened: The anonymous transfers took place in several installments, each of which saw 1,000 BTC worth $47.5 million moved across the blockchain. In total, 11,325 BTC was transferred to different recipient addresses.

The wallet mentioned above has been dormant for more than seven years, blockchain records indicate.

“The massive amount of activated dormant BTC in the previous posts are possibly linked to the Cryptsy hack/theft,” stated WhaleAlert in another update.

Cryptsy is a now-defunct crypto exchange that was operational in the U.S. between 2013 and 2016.

The exchange shut down after announcing it had suffered a security breach where 13,000 BTC and 300,000 Litecoin LTC/USD had been stolen from the platform.

Paul Vernon, the exchange’s founder, was later indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for stealing $1 million from Cryptsy’s user wallets.  

Vernon remains at large and authorities are yet to bring him into custody – however, the coins moved today may bring them a bit closer to tracking him down.

David Silver, a securities fraud and investment loss attorney told CoinDesk in January that he has been tracing the missing 11,325 BTC which remains dormant in private wallets.

“We continue to track those coins in real-time. If Vernon ever tries to liquidate the stolen money, we will work within the boundaries of the law to freeze and recover that stolen bitcoin,” he said.

Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, Bitcoin BTC/USD was trading at $47,100, down 0.94% in the last 24 hours.