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- 🐳 Old wallets wake up 👀
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GM everyone. This is 2036, the newsletter that makes you smart on crypto in 3 min/day.
Crypto wallets that have been inactive for nearly a decade are waking up. 👀
They’re moving hundreds of millions of dollars, in what almost looks like a coordinated move.
What’s going on, and what does this mean for you?
Let’s dig in.
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Crypto whales is a term we use to describe BIG crypto wallets - those that own 1,000 BTC +.
As we go lower down the food chain, the animals get smaller too. Sharks hold 500-1,000 BTC. Shrimp own less than 1 🦐
Now, most crypto whales are holders for the long term. They don’t trade back and forth much.
But this week:
A bitcoin whale with over 6,000 BTC ($175M) transferred $60M for the first time in 9 years
Another with 1,128 BTC ($31M) transferred $7.7M for the first time in 10 years
An Ethereum whale who bought 2,365 ETH in the initial coin offering at $0.31 (worth $4.4M today) transferred 1 ETH for the first time in nearly 8 years - likely as a test before sending more.
So what’s going on?
Turns out there’s a thief in the streets.
Over the last few weeks, an unknown hacker has trained over 5,000 ETH ($9.3M) from OLD wallets.
The hacker’s targeting crypto OGs who bought their coins between 2012 and 2014.
The folks who’ve seen so much sh*t in crypto, they just want to be left alone.
crypto OGs being disturbed by 2023 hackers
The problem is that no one knows how this hacker is getting access to the wallets.
But the whales have no choice: they’ve started to move their funds to new wallets in the hopes that they’ll be out of reach of the hackers.
So what can we learn from this?
Laptops and phones are built to create, browse and share information - not to store secrets.
Your precious crypto should go on a hardware wallet. That’s where it’ll be safest.
We have no affiliation whatsoever with either. As you should know by now, we fly solo like Han Solo.
A hardware wallet is critical. But don’t forget the basics of crypto security:
never use the same password twice (I’m guilty of this one too)
use 2FA (2-factor-authentication) for everything
have three wallets:
one for minting new NFTs
one for assets you want to sell/crypto gaming/staking
and one cold hardware wallet for your precious asset
So be safe out there, and be like the whales: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
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