A significant amount of bitcoin [BTC] acquired by mining during the network’s early stages was moved earlier this week, joining the rare instances where bitcoin from the “Satoshi era” has been transferred.

Over 1,000 bitcoins from an early miner were moved to trading desks and custodian services on Dec. 4, on-chain data firm CryptoQuant shared with CoinDesk in a Thursday report. These tokens were previously moved 13 years ago, between August and November 2010, and were mined from block rewards at an estimated total cost of $100.

Address 35BRV3y2tEJNCHbmVtAe3kXNckYgu8X7av received 999.99 bitcoin in a single transaction and sent the holding to several addresses shortly after receiving them.

The bitcoin transferred was eventually consolidated in address 1CzBL1pEudgqeTtoyPLtrVQHo7nYAZxmKZ, which now holds a balance of 1,028 bitcoin.

These bitcoin holdings have a market value of $40 million at current prices. Satoshi era refers commonly to the period when bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was active on online forums from late 2009 to 2011.

“We speculate this early miner has sold the 1,000 Bitcoin, sending them into an OTC or custodian service,” CryptoQuant analysts told CoinDesk in a note. “Because of the transaction patterns of the receiving address, there is a possibility that the bitcoin was sent into an OTC or custodian service.”

Several Satoshi-era bitcoin have been active since the start of 2023. In July, a wallet that had been dormant for 11 years transferred $30 million worth of the asset to other wallets, while in August, another wallet transferred 1,005 BTC to a new address.

Such activity comes amid renewed optimism for bitcoin adoption as prices have more than doubled on a year-to-date basis.

It's believed bitcoin's price has been rising dramatically over the last few weeks because of anticipation around the approval of a possible spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) approval in the U.S., traders pricing in expected rate cuts in the U.S. – which buoys risky bets such as technology stocks and bitcoin – and possible sovereign adoption as bitcoin-friendly leaders take the helm in major economies.

Bitcoin Mining

Shaurya Malwa

Shaurya is the Co-Leader of the CoinDesk tokens and data team in Asia with a focus on crypto derivatives, DeFi, market microstructure, and protocol analysis. Shaurya holds over $1,000 in BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, SUSHI, CRV, NEAR, YFI, YFII, SHIB, DOGE, USDT, USDC, BNB, MANA, MLN, LINK, XMR, ALGO, VET, CAKE, AAVE, COMP, ROOK, TRX, SNX, RUNE, FTM, ZIL, KSM, ENJ, CKB, JOE, GHST, PERP, BTRFLY, OHM, BANANA, ROME, BURGER, SPIRIT, and ORCA. He provides over $1,000 to liquidity pools on Compound, Curve, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, BurgerSwap, Orca, AnySwap, SpiritSwap, Rook Protocol, Yearn Finance, Synthetix, Harvest, Redacted Cartel, OlympusDAO, Rome, Trader Joe, and SUN.