Coinbase executive Conor Grogan suggested that a giant whale address holding approximately $8 billion worth of Bitcoin may have been hacked.
Grogan stated that based on the activity of the address in question, the private keys may have fallen into the hands of malicious people. If this claim is confirmed, this incident could go down in the history of cryptocurrencies as the biggest digital theft.
Grogan also shared an important detail supporting his claim: “14 hours ago, a low-amount test transaction was carried out on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network from an address belonging to the BTC whale cluster. This may have been done to understand whether the private key was valid.” He noted that all BTC assets started to move within approximately 1 hour after this transaction.
Conor Grogan emphasized that this test operation, especially on the BCH network, was remarkable and said, “BCH is not very well tracked by whale tracking systems. So it is as if the address owner tested the private key here in order to remain anonymous.”
Moreover, other BCH addresses connected to the same set of wallets are still dormant, further raising suspicion, according to Grogan: “If someone gained access to their wallets, why didn’t they also take their other BCH balances?”
Grogan also stated that he found the possibility of this address belonging to a major exchange weak. The presence of both BCH transactions and the fact that BTC transfers appear to have been made manually indicate that these movements indicate individual access, not an exchange system.
“If this is truly a hack, it could be the biggest digital theft in human history,” he said.
However, Grogan added that the data he had was not yet conclusive and that all findings were speculative at this stage.
*This is not investment advice.
