$1.2 million mysteriously deposited in missing Bitcoin founder's abandoned wallet — money deposited anonymously in Satoshi's Genesis wallet

Bitcoin question marks
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

A mysterious deposit of 26.9 BTC has been added to the Genesis wallet. Worth approximately $1.2 million by current valuations, the Bitcoins were transferred to Satoshi Nakamoto’s first cryptocurrency wallet on Friday, January 5, at 1.52 am ET. As ‘Mr Nakamoto’ is missing and there have been no transfers out of this or any of his other known holdings since 2010, the sizable deposit has raised a lot of eyebrows and sparked heated discussion.

The 26.9 BTC Genesis deposit came from a wallet that was funded by a series of rather complex transactions. Three wallets moved funds to 12 wallets, and then the funds were brought together in one wallet which appeared to belong to Binance, according to blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence. That last wallet in the donor chain was emptied into 'Satoshi 1', the Genesis wallet.

(Image credit: Blockchain.com)

The deposited BTC had traveled a very circuitous route, even for cryptocurrency, and to have it drop into what seems to be a monetary black hole makes it an even stranger transaction. As mentioned in the intro, Nakamoto’s funds have effectively been abandoned for well over a decade.

The Genesis wallet now contains nearly 100 BTC, worth over $4.3 million. At the time of Nakamoto’s disappearance, it contained 50 BTC, rising to 72 BTC in late 2023. However, this pseudonymous entity is thought to control many more digital wallets accounting for as many as 1.1 million BTC, and thus a fortune valued at approximately $43 billion.

Let’s touch upon some of the reasons that this 26.9 BTC was deposited. Most of the speculation we have seen involves a party that wished to offload illegally gotten gains. Variations on this theory include someone demonstrably ‘burning’ these BTCs to prove they are serious in some blackmail or extortion-type scheme. There are also theories involving classic pump-and-dump schemes, that it is a crazy BTC marketing ploy, or the act of a jilted lover…

(Image credit: Google)

Bitcoin is currently valued at $44,400. After struggling to get past the $30,000 mark for months, it finally saw a strong and sustained level of recovery starting in late October. The reinvigoration of the iconic cryptocurrency is thought to be due to expectations that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will give the go-ahead for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on BTC.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

Read more
Bitcoin
Man who lost $780 million in Bitcoin in a landfill now wants to buy the entire dump before city closes the site
BTC in the trash
High court ruling ends man's hopes of recovering $750M bitcoin hard drive from a Welsh landfill — hard drive storing 8,000 bitcoins was lost over 10 years ago
Crypto Hacker
FBI identifies North Korea as source of $1.5 billion ByBit hack
Seagate's Exos M HAMR-based hard drive.
Fraudulent hard drive scandal deepens at Seagate: Clues point at Chinese Chia mining farms
NorthridgeFix's ghastly RTX 3090 PCB
Nvidia RTX 3090 sent in to repairer was missing the GPU and all its memory chips
5.25-inch floppy disk
The first-ever ransomware dropped 35 years ago disguised as a floppy sharing 'AIDS Information'
Latest in Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin
Man who lost $780 million in Bitcoin in a landfill now wants to buy the entire dump before city closes the site
BTC in the trash
High court ruling ends man's hopes of recovering $750M bitcoin hard drive from a Welsh landfill — hard drive storing 8,000 bitcoins was lost over 10 years ago
Bitcoin
Bitcoin crosses $100,000 milestone as incoming U.S. administration looks increasingly crypto-friendly
Bitcoin
Bitcoin launderer hands over $400 million as he heads to prison — offender sentenced to three years in prison for laundering money for drug dealers
Bitcoin on fire stock image
Bitcoin skyrockets to an all-time high of over $84,000 — a euphoric surge in investments from Trump's presidential win
Newport Docksway landfill site
Man who lost half-billion dollar Bitcoin HDD sues local authority for $500 million for not letting him dig through landfill
Latest in News
Despite external similarities, the RTX 3090 is not at all the same hardware as the RTX 4090 — even if you lap the GPU and apply AD102 branding.
GPU scam resells RTX 3090 as a 4090 — complete with a fake 'AD102' label on a lapped GPU
Inspur
US expands China trade blacklist, closes susidiary loopholes
WireView Pro 90 degrees
Thermal Grizzly's WireView Pro GPU power measuring utility gets a 90-degree adapter revision
Qualcomm
Qualcomm launches global antitrust campaign against Arm — accuses Arm of restricting access to technology
Nvidia Ada Lovelace and GeForce RTX 40-Series
Analyst claims Nvidia's gaming GPUs could use Intel Foundry's 18A node in the future
Core Ultra 200S CPU
An Arrow Lake refresh may still be in the cards with only K and KF models, claims leaker