$1 Billion Bitcoin Transaction Noticed Mainly Due to High Fees

Rate this post

A lot of heads were turned as a mysterious $1 billion bitcoin transaction was recently completed. What’s interesting to note, is that the transaction became conspicuous not because of its sheer size but because the spender spent “a large amount” on fees.

Many users on social media spend hours trying to guess both the origin and the destination of the funds when the transaction completed last week. This was a record as the $1 billion bitcoin transaction involved 94 504 bitcoins.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 94,504 #BTC (1,018,147,922 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

Tx: https://t.co/VWb8slswa8

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 6, 2019

Whale Alert – the twitter service which follows large and extremely large crypto movements, stated that the record-breaking transaction did not involve known wallets. This removes the possibility of a crypto exchange or crypto-focused organization being behind the $1 billion bitcoin transaction.

Many theories about the $1 billion bitcoin transaction

The theory which gained the most traction was that the wallet belonged to the Institutional trading platform Bakkt.

Institutions building inventory for their market-making needs going forward. This = effective ‘put’ on the BTC price at $9,000 (as I’ve been reporting for several yrs now). Ie, institutions are net-buyers of any BTC that shows up at $9k. Risk/reward now for buyers is excellent. https://t.co/up7irZufX6

— Max Keiser, tweet poet. (@maxkeiser) September 6, 2019

The massive transaction also caught the eyes of Max Keiser who shared his thoughts on institutions building inventory for their future marketing-making needs.

It appears however, that despite the transaction being worth a little over $1 billion, most people caught wind of it due to the “extremely high fee” which was paid by the mysterious sender.

The sender used 480 satoshis per byte which puts the fee at around $700.

The price of fees depends on the desired transaction fees of the sender. If he wants the transaction to be processed by miners quicker, the sender pays more, it’s not rocket science.

Many wallets also do have a manual fee-setting, which means that the more money spent, the less blocks the sender must wait to receive a transaction confirmation.

Currently, if a sender wants his transaction to be included in the next block – a maximum of roughly 10 minutes, costs around 23 satoshis per byte. This basically means that the sender of the mysterious transaction overpaid by nearly 20 times.

The $1 billion transaction could have been completed in 10 or so minutes by a simple payment of $35, but what’s $700 when you have more than a billion.

You can also check out: