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A Crypto Mining Firm May Have Moved $150M in Bitcoin, CryptoQuant Says
The price of bitcoin dropped by 3% on the day the $150 million was moved out of the miner's wallet.
Updated May 9, 2023, 4:13 a.m. Published Apr 25, 2023, 2:49 p.m.
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CORRECTION (April 26, 13:52 UTC): An earlier version of this story said that mining firm Poolin may have moved the funds.
UPDATE (April 25, 17:41 UTC): Adds denial from Poolin and WuBlockchain's details on the potential mislabeling of the wallet by CryptoQuant.
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A mining firm moved $150 million worth of bitcoin from its wallet to Binance on April 21, according to CryptoQuant data, around the time the world's largest digital asset dropped to $28,000.
This marks the biggest outflow from a mining entity since December 2020.
CoinDesk wasn't able to immediately confirm the identity of the firm that moved the bitcoin.
CoinDesk reported yesterday that it was Poolin that moved the funds, a mining pool that froze users wallets in September due to liquidity issues, citing CryptoQuant.
On Tuesday, Kevin Pan, CEO and founder of Poolin disputed the data to CoinDesk, adding that the wallet address doesn’t match up to the company’s profile and activity. Meanwhile, news outlet WuBlockchain tweeted that it might be a case of mislabeling of the address. CryptoQuant couldn't be reached for comment.
While the data firm had originally mislabeled the wallet as Poolin's, they confirmed that the overall context is correct, meaning it was a mining firm that moved the $150 million.
CryptoQuant added on Wednesday that it was likely Bitmain-affiliated AntPool that moved the funds. AntPool could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.
The data and intelligence firm told CoinDesk that there is a "higher probability that the wallet address is more affiliated with the AntPool entity than Poolin entity. There is inevitably some level of inaccuracy in the clustering algorithm" and that "the bridge wallet address was tricky."
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