New wallet’s $570 million in bitcoin comes from the ‘Eastern Whale’ account

There’s a brand new bitcoin wallet with over half a billion dollars in value and no one seems to know exactly who or what’s behind it. What’s more, the wallet was funded from the “Eastern Whale,” an account that entranced cryptocurrency-watchers two months ago.

As reported by India-based AMBCrypto, the address is now the sixth most valuable in all of bitcoin. It clocks in at a whopping 85,947.12 BTC—or $570,285,148 as of this writing, according to BitInfoCharts’ Rich List. The account was funded on July 1 at 9:29 a.m. GMT.

Using data from Bitcoin’s blockchain, one can trace the origins of the bitcoins that funded the wallet, whose address is 183hmJGRuTEi2YDCWy5iozY8rZtFwVgahM. Most of it came from an account with the address 1KAt6STtisWMMVo5XGdos9P7DBNNsFfjx7. That wallet was first funded on March 25 and within two months contained 93,947.12 BTC (worth $695,981090 at the time). It now has no balance with this recent transfer.

According to an English-language post from Chinese site BABI Finance back in May, 1KAt6STtisWMMVo5XGdos9P7DBNNsFfjx7 belonged to someone they described as “one mysterious billionaire from the Orient”, which is usually code for “nobody really knows anything.” The account was dubbed the “Eastern Whale.” As BABI Finance reported:

“[A]fter tracking the sending sources, BABI Finance found that nearly 20,000 Bitcoins are from Chinese platforms, Huobi and Haobtc. And another 67,000 are from the wholesale transfer of fourteen ‘single accounts’, some of the Bitcoins behind these ‘single accounts’ can also be traced to Chinese trading platform. It is suspected that the ‘oriental whale’ is hoarding Bitcoin at the low price.”

For example, on March 25, the Eastern Whale took in 44,404.04 BTC (worth $376,228,326 at the time) from a total of five wallets, each virtually liquidating in the process.

Five days later, it took in 9,000 BTC ($61,683,840 at the time) from an account with the address 1EAJQtXghRrvGe7h8mk44wf2toSL2c8QGC, which also sent an additional 450 BTC to third wallet and liquidated. However, 1EAJQtXghRrvGe7h8mk44wf2toSL2c8QGC immediately began accumulating bitcoins again and on April 2, it was just about liquidated by sending 2,801 BTC ($19,815,955) to—of course—the Eastern Whale.

When the Eastern Whale wallet started accumulating bitcoins, the virtual currency was at $8,470.32. Some hailed his/her/their strategy of “buying the dips”. When the Eastern Whale transferred the bulk of its balance to this new account on Sunday, bitcoin was at $6,371.51, a 25 percent decline.

It remains to be seen if this was a case of someone transferring an enormous amount of bitcoin to another location for a specific reason or if the Eastern Whale gave up and sold the dip to another whale.