About 100 bitcoin mined in July 2010 moved late Wednesday after sitting untouched for more than 16 years, carrying a market value of roughly $8.5 million at current prices. The transaction, confirmed at 18:52 UTC, sent the coins to two new addresses, according to CoinDesk's review of Bitcoin's public transaction record.

Galaxy Research, the research arm of cryptocurrency financial services firm Galaxy Digital, first flagged the movement on X. The firm noted the unusual age of the holding and its direct link to early block rewards.

What exactly moved, and when?

The 100.02 BTC arrived at the address on July 30, 2010, and remained there until Wednesday's confirmation. Bitcoin traded around 6 cents at the time of receipt, according to historical pricing data from StatMuse, putting the coins' original market value at approximately $6. That comparison describes appreciation in market value, not what the holder paid or realized in any sale.

CoinDesk traced the payment directly to two mining rewards created in July 2010: one worth 50 BTC and the other 50.02 BTC, including fees. Miners received 50 newly created coins per block at the time, a subsidy level that stood until the first halving in 2012.

Wednesday's transaction combined the old holding with six tiny later deposits. It sent 10 BTC to one address and roughly 90.02 BTC to another. Both holdings remained unspent as of Thursday morning, and public records do not show who controls the receiving addresses or whether the coins will be sold.

Why does the address look active if the coins sat still for 16 years?

The alert prompted questions online because the same address had spent other bitcoin between 2011 and 2018. The explanation lies in Bitcoin's accounting model. The protocol tracks incoming payments separately, allowing a wallet to spend one payment while leaving another untouched. Those unspent payments are called UTXOs — unspent transaction outputs. An address can therefore remain active while some of its coins sit still for years, which is what happened here.

On-chain records show the address spent 200 BTC across two transactions in August 2015, another 100 BTC in December 2017 and 249 BTC in March 2018. The separate 100.02 BTC payment from July 2010 remained unspent throughout that entire period.

"This address has been somewhat active in the past, but these specific coins have not moved since 2010. We track the coins," Galaxy Research said in its post on X.

Do the coins belong to Satoshi Nakamoto?

The coins date from the "Satoshi era," the period when Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator was still active in the project's development and communication channels. Their age alone does not establish any connection to Nakamoto. Thousands of early miners and users operated during that window, and dormancy is a common feature of holdings from Bitcoin's first years.

A successful transfer does establish one operational fact: someone retains access to the private keys controlling these coins. Coins long absent from trading are sometimes treated as lost. A confirmed spend demonstrates the opposite, even though the public record cannot reveal whether the spender is the original owner or what they intend to do next.

Could these coins reach the market?

Old holdings attract attention because coins long absent from trading can become available to sell again. There is precedent for far larger early holdings reaching the market. Galaxy confirmed in July 2025 that it sold more than 80,000 BTC on behalf of an early investor as part of an estate-planning strategy. Wednesday's transfer is far smaller, and its records do not establish any sale — the funds simply moved to two new addresses and stayed there overnight.

The market-structure question now is whether the 100.02 BTC stays put in its new addresses or moves again toward exchange-linked wallets, which would signal intent to liquidate. For now, the on-chain evidence shows only that a 16-year-old mining payout has changed hands, and the receiving addresses have made no further transactions.