Bitcoin wallets untouched since the cryptocurrency traded for a few dollars keep waking up.
Six wallets last active between 2011 and 2014 moved a combined 553.59 BTC worth about $40 million between Aug. 16 and Aug. 26, according to data tracked by Galaxy Research. One had not moved a coin in more than 15 years.
Moves like these often revive fears that bitcoin's earliest holders are finally cashing out.
Read more: Satoshi-era bitcoin at center of $285 billion lawsuit moves after 14 years
However, the amount of dormant bitcoin moving onchain fell in the second quarter to its lowest level since the third quarter of 2022, according to Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital. Galaxy counts a coin as dormant when it has remained at the same address for at least a year.
The slowdown follows two unusually busy years. Old bitcoin moved in 2024 and 2025 at levels rivaled only by the 2017 bull market, when early holders sitting on enormous gains began spending or moving their coins. Galaxy described that period as a "great distribution" and said 2026 is on pace to see less than half as much dormant bitcoin move as last year.
Movement does not necessarily mean selling, however. Bitcoin's public blockchain shows coins leaving one address and arriving at another, but usually cannot say whether the owner sold, changed wallets, moved to a custodian or simply reorganized their holdings.
Five of the six decade-old wallets this month sent their bitcoin to addresses with no known exchange links. The sixth moved 40 BTC to Boerse Stuttgart Digital, a German crypto custody and trading provider.
Two of the six carry labels connecting them to a New York lawsuit in which a pseudonymous plaintiff known as Noah Doe is seeking control of bitcoin held across 39,069 dormant addresses under the state's lost-property laws.
The plaintiffs sent tiny amounts of bitcoin to those addresses along with onchain legal notices, arguing that the coins could be treated as abandoned if nobody established ownership.
CoinDesk reported in June that one address named in the case moved 35.55 BTC after remaining untouched since March 2011, one of the first visible responses from a wallet targeted in the lawsuit.
After a flaw in certain Coldcard hardware wallets was disclosed in late July, roughly 210,000 BTC left wallets classified by Glassnode as belonging to long-term holders in a single week. The vulnerability made poorly generated wallet keys easier for attackers to guess, prompting some users to move bitcoin into newly created wallets or regulated custody even when their own coins were not directly exposed.
Read more: Coldcard fallout shows up onchain as 210,000 bitcoin leaves old wallets
Bitcoin wallets whose public keys have already been exposed are among those that could eventually be vulnerable if quantum computers become powerful enough to break the mathematics protecting today's digital signatures. CoinDesk reported in April that roughly 6.9 million BTC could fall into that category under such a scenario.
That has made quantum risk an increasingly tempting explanation whenever very old bitcoin starts moving, a sentiment that Thorn has pushed back on.
"We work with a lot of whales and none has mentioned quantum as a reason for selling," he wrote in July, adding that he had heard quantum concerns cited by some institutional investors as a reason not to buy bitcoin.