The latest news show that one of the leading exchanges named Bitfinex moved $1 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) for a fee of only 48 cents. The transaction followed fresh developments in the court case involving Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who claims to have invented Bitcoin and gave himself the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.
In the latest crypto news, we can see that Wright now says that he can prove ownership of 1 million BTC (around $8.6 billion) but the available evidence suggests that he has only divulged the publicly available information and has not proven ownership of the given private keys.
Against a scene of uncertainty surrounding the entire Wright case, the fears were about a major selloff which would impact the Bitcoin price. However, a fake tweet by Whale Alert showed that Bitfinex moved $1 billion shortly after Wright’s claims.
The commentators paid significant attention to the $1 billion transactions – and the Whale Alert tweet received almost 1,000 retweets in under 12 hours. However, the significance of everything was a false alarm and as Bitfinex moved the funds, it said that it was refilling its hot wallet.
“It’s a 1.5k BTC refill of hot wallet and resulting change address movement,” the CTO of the exchange Paolo Ardoino said in a response.
Bitfinex moved $1 billion and paid just 48 cents to send the funds, something which is a record so far. Meanwhile, exchanges are now in charge of a larger chunk of the Bitcoin supply than ever before as the Bitcoin news now show.
In fact, statistics from the monitoring resource Glassnode confirm that as of January 8, the BTC exchange balances are 2.12 million BTC – which is 11% of the supply. These include both user balances and addresses which belong to exchanges, such as cold wallets and those behind the Bitfinex transaction.
The trend accelerated over the course of the entire year (2019) despite all the community efforts to raise awareness of the risks involved in trusting third parties with Bitcoin private keys. Among these, we could see Proof of Keys, the social media event organized by the advocate Trace Mayer.
Meanwhile, BTC is stable at $8,767 in a market with a $239 billion total market cap.
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