$161 Million in Decade-Old Bitcoin Has Moved in Just Two Weeks

By Decrypt Staff

The steady procession of long-dormant Bitcoin wallets springing back to life is showing no sign of slowing, with four more ancient stashes moving a combined $161 million over the past two weeks.

According to Galaxy Research's blockchain monitoring, the awakened wallets moved 1,971.03 BTC in all between Sept. 6 and Sept. 22. The largest, holding 1,260.78 BTC worth about $100.63 million, had sat untouched since July 2016, more than 10 years, potentially delivering a gain of roughly 12,122% on a cost basis near $652.

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The oldest coins carried even larger returns in terms of percentage gains. A wallet dormant since March 2011, holding 10.25 BTC now worth about $792,000, notched a gain of more than 8.38 million percent from an average cost around $1. Another 100 BTC, untouched since November 2011 and worth about $8.09 million, was up roughly 2.49 million percent.

The most recent stirred just hours ago. Early Tuesday, a wallet holding 600 BTC, worth about $51.9 million, moved coins that had been dormant since July 2012, a 14.2-year slumber that could have yielded a gain of more than 1 million percent.

Three of the four wallets carried a "Noah Doe" sender tag, a reference to a New York lawsuit that seeks to have thousands of dormant Bitcoin addresses declared abandoned property. Named wallets tied to that case have been stirring regularly since a judge paused the proceedings in June.

The activity extends a trend that has defined 2026 on-chain activity on Bitcoin. An earlier wave saw six wallets move roughly $40 million in a single 10-day stretch, and a Galaxy chart showed Bitcoin's oldest cohort, coins untouched for a decade or more, stirring at a pace rarely seen.

Such movements draw scrutiny because so few holders from Bitcoin's earliest days still control their private keys, making each awakening a potential signal of long-lost supply returning to circulation.

A transfer alone doesn't reveal whether an owner is selling, consolidating or shifting to new custody, and the recipient of the latest 600 BTC transfer was not identified on-chain.

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