Xapo moves $633 million Bitcoin for less than a pint of milk

Someone moved approximately 100,000 Bitcoin this week—worth around $633 million at the time of the transaction—for a mere $0.26. 

The transaction, carried out on April 1, was caught by the crypto community's resident vigilante, the Twitter account Whale Alert. Whale Alert scours public blockchains for huge crypto trades and publishes information about them on its Twitter page.

Per data from Blockchain.com, the entire transaction fee amounted to 3935 sats—the equivalent to just $0.26.

As pointed out by several Redditors, the transfer required neither identity checks nor trusted intermediaries, and, of course, cost only a few cents. 

By contrast, customers of TransferWise—a popular method of remittance—must pay around $3,600 in fees to send $1 million (the maximum transferable amount). Furthermore, it would take approximately three days for that transaction to arrive.

People are taking their crypto off of exchanges

As with any massive transfer, the worry is that the recipient would dump all that Bitcoin on the market, causing the price of Bitcoin to sink.

Fears were allayed when Whale Alert revealed that the transaction was simply an internal transfer from crypto custody service, Xapo.  This suggests that Xapo was just shuffling money around rather than preparing for a massive selloff.

It’s often a worrying sign when someone puts a huge amount of crypto into an exchange. But data from market intelligence firm Glassnode suggests that the outflow of Bitcoin from exchanges appears to be on the rise. 

Glassnode noted a marked increase in Bitcoin withdrawals since Bitcoin’s price plummeted in the middle of last month. In fact, exchange balances hit their lowest ebb in eight months, it reported.

As reported by Decrypt, a significant amount of new users have also signed up to crypto exchanges. 

Global quarantines in the aftermath of COVID-19 have apparently led to a doubling—and in some instances—a tripling of typical exchange signup rate, according to various leading exchanges.