16,000 bitcoins have been moved from cold storage on the now defunct Mt. Gox sparking rumors that the ‘Tokyo Bitcoin Whale’ is set to make another move in the near future. The value of the digital assets that have been moved is approximated at $170 million.

According to a report from Cryptoground, a site that tracks the remaining wallets on Mt. Gox, the bitcoins were moved on April 26th from four different wallets.

This led many to the assumption that Nobuaki Kobayashi, the bankruptcy trustee for the exchange, who is also known as the Tokyo Bitcoin Whale, is planning to carry out another sell-off.

In March, the trustee reported that he had sold off a total of $400 million worth of bitcoin cash and bitcoin last year in previous months.

According to blockchain data reports, the exchange now has a 146,106 bitcoins in various addresses.

Kobayashi was mandated with the responsibility of liquidating the digital assets that on the exchange on behalf of its creditors. A majority of them are yet to recover their funds since 2014 when it ceased operations.

A Mountain of Controversy

However, the process has been rocked with controversy seeing as the value of the tokens held far exceeds their claims.

Mt. Gox came into existence on 2010 and at the peak of its performance, it dominated the market, holding approximately 80% of the global trading volume at the time.

Previous sell-offs have coincided with major price declines for bitcoin and the crypto market as a whole. A case in point was a February funds transfer which coincided with a 50% drop in cryptocurrency market capitalization from the previous record high of more than $800 million.

Should the speculations be true and bitcoins worth about $170 million are sold off into the market, the crypto community will be expecting major price fluctuations.