Last week, it was reported that a Bitcoin whale has transformed 856,000 Bitcoins into 107 wallet addresses with a balance of 8,000 BTC in each. Although Bitcoin has been in a bearish trend and falling to half of its value in just over a month, the total BTC hoarded in those addresses still worth $2.91 billion, which accounts for over 4.9% of the total Bitcoins in circulations and 2.7% of the current crypto market capitalization.

People are concerned about large amount BTC transactions and wondering the true identity of the whale. Some Insiders also gives their own speculations.

Some local media said that these Bitcoins belonged to FEE.org as some of those address, for example, bc1q3s3, are marked as fee.org address by BitInfoCharts. However, this analyze is unrealistic, the BTC donation address provided by FEE.org (15B8iGCndPacYsvLqrTNL4LqjHo7JX752h) only received 2.21485713 BTC.

Mao Shixing, co-founder of F2pool, the world’s fourth-largest Bitcoin mining pool speculated that FEE uses Coinbase wallet service to collect money, and there are 13,670,127 correlated addresses, which matches well with the number of registered users of Coinbase.

In fact, Coinbase has posted an announcement in its official blog on November 29, informed that the exchange would run scheduled maintenance across its platform that may ‘cause movements on all Coinbase-supported blockchains’.

The time of the suspected BTC transactions also took place between December 1 and December 6, which matches the timeline mentioned in the announcement.

All these above shows that there is no ‘big whale’, the 856,000 bitcoins belong to the exchange platform and its users.

According to 8BTC, this BTC transaction conducted by Coinbase is quite reasonable. In a bear market, the transaction fee of Bitcoin is pretty low, as thus, it becomes a good time for maintenance.

In addition, transferring the funds to the SegWit “bc1” address can effectively reduce transaction costs and redistributing wallets is a common financial network security strategy to decentralize the risk.

Actually, many BTC large transfers in history have been substantiated were exchanges maintaining their wallets, so we do not have to over-interpret this issue.