Bitfinex Exchange Confirms Transfer of $ 1 Billion in BTC to Hot Wallet

The mysterious person who completed the transaction at 123,447.6 BTC (a little less than $ 1.1 billion) turned out to be the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. As confirmed by the company’s technical director Paolo Ardoino, the transaction became a part of the 150 thousand coins transfer to the exchange’s hot wallet.

The indicated amount was sent to the so-called change-address, the spending of coins from which is impossible until the transaction is fully confirmed on the network.

This is a 1.5k BTC hot wallet refill.
123k went to change address.https://t.co/BAfrMtIOUb https://t.co/zzkXp6ZHw0

— Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) January 15, 2020

As a result of this operation, the second-largest address was created on the Bitcoin network, second only to the cold wallet of the Huobi exchange. The latter currently has 255 502 BTC (more than $ 2.2 billion).

As @Rhythmtrader notes, no government, bank or any third party should have verified the transaction and could not stop it even if they wanted to, which once again confirms the true power of bitcoin
Thus, the number of transferred BTC is almost 0.7% of the total number of coins issued to date. The mentioned Huobi exchange wallet accounts for 1.4% of the total issue.

124,946 bitcoin were just moved in a transaction.

That’s ~$1,100,000,000 transfered for an $80 fee.

No government, bank or third party had to verify the transaction, nor could they have stopped it if they wanted to.

The true power of bitcoin. 🔥

— Rhythm (@Rhythmtrader) January 14, 2020

The transfer fee was 0.0096 BTC, or about $ 80, which is generally quite a high amount by the standards of the current state of the Bitcoin network. For example, in May 2019, a SegWit transaction was recorded for 40,000 BTC ($ 230 million at that time), the commission for which was only 0.0001 BTC or 57 cents.

Recall that at the beginning of December 2019, the record volume of transactions per hour in dollar terms was recorded in the Bitcoin network in dollar terms – $ 8.9 billion.

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