Sleeping Bitcoins worth $3.65 million moved for the first time since 2011

A total of 81.79 Bitcoins (BTC) mined in 2011 and lying idle since then were used for transactions for the first time on Sunday, according to blockchain parser BTCparsers, reported Bitcoin.com. BTCparsers is a blockchain-based registry of every Bitcoin wallet and transaction ever made.  

Also referred to as ‘sleeping bitcoin’ transactions, the bitcoins were valued at $3.65 million. The first transaction involved 50 Bitcoins from January 2011 and was worth $2.2 million. It was followed by a second transaction of 32.79 Bitcoins that was mined in August 2011 and was worth $1.4 million  

According to Bitcoin.com, this is the 14th time a sleeping bitcoin stash from 2011 was moved this year. In the first instance in January, four stashes were moved, after which seven were moved in February and three this month.   

It is not yet clear what led the wallet owner to bring the Bitcoins back in circulation after over a decade. Perhaps it is because of the recent fluctuations in the prices of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoins. After the value of Bitcoin soared to $69,000, it again dropped to $38,964 within a span of a few months. Though the value of Bitcoins has dropped 18.9% year-on-year (YoY) against the US dollar, its value has increased by 5.8% last week and 16.4% during the last month.   

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Out of the 21 million Bitcoins that can be ever mined, 18.9 million are in circulation. According to some estimates, 19 million Bitcoins will be mined over the next week.  

Though the cryptos have still not been legalised in many countries, they have received some validation from lawmakers who have refrained from slapping a blanket ban on the cryptos. In some markets such as India, digital assets such as cryptos have been put under a 30% tax ambit. In some countries such as Ukraine, cryptos including Bitcoin and Ethereum have been accepted as legal tender.