Bitcoin wallets that had laid dormant for more than a decade are being revived.
Six wallets that were last active between 2011 and 2014 moved around $40 million in the cryptocurrency between Aug. 16 and Aug. 26, CoinDesk reported Sunday (Aug. 30), citing data from Galaxy Research.
One of the wallets had been inactive for 15 years, the report said, adding that these types of moves often trigger concerns that bitcoin’s earliest holders have begun to cash out.
Still, the amount of dormant bitcoin moving on-chain declined during the second quarter to its lowest level since the third quarter of 2022, CoinDesk added, citing Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital. That company considers a coin dormant if it has been held at the same address for at least a year.
According to the report, these slowdowns come in the wake of two unusually busy years. In 2024 and 2025, older bitcoin moved at levels seen only during the 2017 bull market. Galaxy dubbed that period as a “great distribution” and said this year is on track to see less than half as much dormant bitcoin move as in 2025.
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At the same time, CoinDesk added, movement doesn’t automatically mean selling. Bitcoin’s public blockchain shows coins moving from address to address but can’t typically show whether the owner sold, switched wallets, moved to a custodian or just reorganized their holdings.
The report added that five of the six wallets in question sent their coin to addresses with no known exchange links, with the sixth shifting 40 BTC to Boerse Stuttgart Digital, a crypto custody and trading provider based in Germany.
Two of the wallets have labels tying them to a lawsuit in New York in which a plaintiff known as “Noah Doe” is citing the state’s lost property laws to claim bitcoin held in 39,069 dormant addresses. As covered here earlier this year, one address named in the case moved 35.55 BTC after remaining untouched since March 2011, one of the first reported responses from a wallet tied to that lawsuit.
In other crypto news, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that adoption of digital assets remains limited among middle market companies, largely due to regulatory concerns.
According to the report “Stablecoins Gain Ground: Why CFOs See More Promise There Than in Crypto,” 77% of CFOs pointed to regulatory or compliance uncertainty as a barrier for crypto adoption, with 67% saying the same about stablecoins.
“The next issues are practical ones: Forty percent cite integration with existing financial systems for crypto, and 43% say the same about stablecoins,” the report said. “The issue centers on whether these tools fit inside real finance workflows.”