According to data gathered by Galaxy Research, six wallets last used between 2011 and 2014 moved a total of 553.59 $BTC worth approximately $40 million between August 16 and 26. One of the wallets had not been used for over 15 years.
Such incidents often raise concerns that early Bitcoin holders are finally deciding to sell.
However, according to Alex Thorn, Head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy Digital, the amount of dormant bitcoin moving on-chain fell to its lowest level since Q3 2022 in Q2 of this year. Galaxy considers a coin inactive if it has remained at the same address for at least one year.
The slowdown followed two exceptionally busy years. Old bitcoin moved in 2024 and 2025 at levels only rivaled by the 2017 bull market, when early holders sitting on huge profits began spending or moving their coins. Galaxy characterized this period as the "great distribution" and stated that dormant bitcoin movement in 2026 is expected to be half of last year's.
However, movement does not necessarily mean selling. Bitcoin's public blockchain shows coins leaving one address and arriving at another but typically cannot indicate whether the owner sold, changed wallets, moved to a custodian, or simply reorganized their assets.
Five of the six decade-old wallets this month sent their bitcoins to addresses not associated with known exchanges. The sixth wallet transferred 40 $BTC to Boerse Stuttgart Digital, a German company providing cryptocurrency custody and trading services.
Two of the six wallets are tagged as being involved in a New York lawsuit where a plaintiff under the pseudonym Noah Dow is seeking control of bitcoins held across 39,069 inactive addresses under state unclaimed property laws.
The plaintiffs have sent small amounts of bitcoin to these addresses along with legal notices on-chain, claiming the coins could be considered abandoned if no one proves ownership.
In June, it was reported that one address named in the case moved 35.55 $BTC after remaining untouched since March 2011, marking one of the first visible responses from a wallet targeted by the lawsuit.
After a bug was discovered in some Coldcard hardware wallets in late July, around 210,000 $BTC left wallets classified by Glassnode as belonging to long-term holders within a week. The vulnerability made it easier for attackers to guess poorly generated wallet keys, prompting some users to move bitcoins to newly created wallets or regulated custody, even if their own coins were not directly exposed.
Bitcoin wallets whose public keys have already been disclosed are among those that could eventually become vulnerable if quantum computers become powerful enough to break the mathematical methods protecting modern digital signatures. In April, it was reported that approximately 6.9 million $BTC could fall into this category under such a scenario.
This makes the quantum risk an increasingly tempting explanation whenever very old bitcoin starts moving, a view that Thorn rejects.
end-content"We work with many large investors, and none of them have mentioned quantum computing as a reason to sell," he wrote in July, adding that he has heard some institutional investors cite quantum concerns as a reason not to buy bitcoin.
