A viral claim about a 2011-era Bitcoin whale buying $2.45B turned out to be a recently created corporate treasury address. Here's what really happened.
A claim started making rounds yesterday: a wallet dormant since 2011 had just bought roughly 26,900 BTC—worth around $2.45 billion. The implication? A Satoshi-era whale was back in action, quietly accumulating at scale. Dramatic stuff, if true.
It wasn't.
The address in question, often referenced as "3FsDiW," wasn't dormant since 2011. It was created on January 10, 2026. Blockchain trackers quickly linked it to Twenty One Capital, a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company run by Jack Mallers. The company holds over 43,000 BTC on its balance sheet and operates as a corporate vehicle for Bitcoin exposure—similar to MicroStrategy's model.
What happened was routine: Twenty One Capital conducted a small test transaction of 1 BTC to Bitfinex, then consolidated the remaining funds from another wallet they already controlled into the new "3FsDiW" address. No ancient miner waking up. No mystery accumulation event. Just standard treasury management.
The confusion appears to have stemmed from an edited or misleading screenshot circulating on X. It framed the transfer as if the receiving address had been dormant for over a decade, when in reality it was the exact opposite—a freshly minted wallet tied to an active corporate entity.
What's interesting here isn't the wallet itself. It's how quickly a narrative can take off before anyone actually checks the data. On-chain transparency is supposed to prevent this kind of thing, but it still requires someone to look.
The real Satoshi-era wallets do move occasionally—there have been legitimate cases in 2025 of dormant 2009–2011 addresses activating after 14+ years. But this wasn't one of them.
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