A secret Bitcoin Cash Test could have been done before the $800 million BTC move

Bitcoin Cash Movement

It took place late Friday amid the mysterious transfer of “Satosiera” Bitcoin worth $8.5 billion.

Coinbase director Conor Grogan flagged a suspicious BCH transaction of over 10,000 tokens (valued nearly $5 million at its current price) tied to one of the whale’s wallets a few hours before the main transfer began.

The move increased the possibility that someone had access to the legacy private key and quietly tested it before launching a massive BTC movement.

“It’s possible they were testing their private keys in a way that the owner wouldn’t notice,” Grogan posted to X.

Eight wallets, which have been on hiatus since 2011, each transferred 10,000 BTC to their new Segwit address on Friday. This is more than 14 years since I first received Bitcoin, now colloquially known as the “atshi era” of the network.

So far, none of the wallets have been linked to known entities or companies, but the timing, scale and manual nature of the transfer has caused alarm bells.

Grogan noted that only one BCH address was mentioned associated with the BTC cluster. “Would you like to clean up others?” he asked. “That means the actor may not be fully accessible.”

But the timing is creepy. Just an hour after the BCH test transfer, the first of 80,000 BTC began to move.

So far, the new Bitcoin address has not transferred any more funds or deposited them on the exchange. However, BCH tests could indicate that someone was probed before performing a coordinated transfer to avoid triggering whale alerts or market spokes.

Other theories extend from private key leaks to quantum computing attacks.

Bitcoin’s initial addresses, particularly the Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) format, exposes the public key after the first transaction.

(Dormant wallets that have never revealed public keys are safe in the quantum future, as public keys are not present in reverse engineers.)

So, the fact that only one related BCH wallet moved during testing, while the other BCH wallets moved during testing suggests that access is limited.