A long-dormant Bitcoin wallet tied to an early-era miner reactivated on January 11, 2026 and moved 2,000 BTC—about $181 million at the time—to Coinbase. The transfer briefly lined up with price pressure near the $94,000 resistance area, but the market absorbed the flow without a structural breakdown.
The move immediately put dormant-supply dynamics back on the table, because coins that have sat idle for roughly 15 years can change near-term liquidity optics even if they don’t trigger immediate selling.
🚨🚨🚨 A miner just sold 2,000 BTC from block rewards dormant since 2010, transferring the funds to Coinbase Exchange.
The funds were held in 40 P2PK addresses.https://t.co/r6ePadKUAu
— Sani | TimechainIndex.com (@SaniExp) January 10, 2026
What the transfer signaled in the short term
In absolute and historical terms, sending the entire 2,000 BTC balance from a ~15-year-inactive wallet straight to an exchange is a meaningful “vintage supply” event. The on-chain pattern looked concentrated rather than distributed across many smaller wallets, which can tighten sell-side liquidity in the moment even if broader order-book depth holds.
Around the block containing the transfer, there was no sustained spike in transaction entropy across subsequent blocks, and the liquidity impact appeared intraday rather than persistent. Put differently, conditions tightened briefly, then normalized within the same trading window.
Looking at the broader cohort backdrop, Satoshi-era miners were comparatively restrained in 2025 versus the heavier vintage selling seen in 2024, which fits a pattern of selective portfolio actions rather than panic liquidation. In that context, the psychological signal from a reactivated early wallet can feel larger than the immediate mechanical impact.
Plausible operational motivations
One operational explanation is custody modernization: moving aged coins to a regulated exchange can reflect a custody consolidation decision rather than an immediate intent to liquidate. Another is targeted rebalancing, where long-term holders convert paper gains into manageable exchange exposure without flooding the market at once.
From a cohort-analysis perspective, reactivating early wallets can incrementally increase available circulating supply without automatically translating into broad retail sell pressure. The decisive variable is what happens next—whether the coins stay parked under exchange custody or begin distributing into the market.
Going forward, the practical watch item is whether more dormant wallets follow the same “to exchange/custodian” pathway, because repeated events would matter more than any single transfer. For developers and node operators, sporadic bursts of large inputs can also shift mempool behavior and fee microstructure in the short term, affecting efficiency for smaller transactions during brief periods of higher block density.
