As the Bitcoin price has rapidly crashed this week, the wealth of the mysterious BTC creator, widely famous under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has shrunk by a gargantuan $20 billion in fiat since Bitcoin’s recent all-time high, per recent estimates.
According to Arkham Intelligence, Satoshi’s Bitcoin stash, which has remained untouched since his disappearance in 2010, constitutes around 1 million BTC. But the current market decline has struck it heavily, making it lose a large piece of its value. Bitcoin has tumbled thanks to Trump announcing a new round of trade war with China and mammoth outflows from Bitcoin ETFs, which have been taking place over the past weeks. This time, they surpassed one billion dollars. As for the Bitcoin price, on Sunday it bottomed at slightly above $106,000 and then managed to rebound to $108,800.
Satoshi’s BTC wealth untouched for over decade
Arkham analysts believe that Satoshi’s wallet contains 1.096 million Bitcoins, currently worth approximately $118,782,747,625. These coins were mined by the anonymous creator when the network was just launched, between 2009 and 2010. Back then, Bitcoin blocks were easier to mine and mining was much less competitive than it is today. Besides, some of the coins that now belong to the stash were sent to Satoshi from grateful crypto enthusiasts who wanted to thank him for inventing Bitcoin, the world’s most scarce asset.
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While, as mentioned above, Satoshi’s Bitcoin stash is currently worth more than $118 billion, in early October, when Bitcoin smashed a new historic peak of $126,000, Nakamoto’s wealth reached an ATH of more than $136 billion. By now, around $20 billion has been wiped off from it. Still, even now, Satoshi Nakamoto exceeds a co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, in net worth, with $105.6 billion that belongs to the latter.
The fascinating thing about Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallet is not the huge sum of Bitcoin it holds but its long-standing dormancy. The coins have never been moved even once since they were mined. This supports the theory that Satoshi has remained inactive, at least when it comes to the BTC network, since 2010. For many, the dormancy of this wallet symbolizes the reserve of the Bitcoin protocol itself. However, now that the market value of these coins has drastically declined, so has Satoshi’s “sovereign wealth.”
Trump’s new China tariffs and ETF outflows
On October 9, Bitcoin traded as high as $123,950, while now it is changing hands slightly under $109,000. A massive sell-off was unleashed in the market as Donald Trump announced that, as of November 1, new import tariffs would be implemented on China and would constitute 100%. Added to the current tariffs, they would in total amount to 145%.
This sent shockwaves through the markets, including those of cryptocurrencies. As the sell-off started, financial institutions yielded to panic and began withdrawing their funds from spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), investment tools that track the Bitcoin spot price.
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According to various analytics sources, recently, Bitcoin ETFs have lost a gargantuan amount of funds as they faced an enormous $1.23 billion in outflows within a single week. This was the second-largest cumulative outflow this year. In February, these Bitcoin funds saw $2.61 billion in fiat withdrawn from them. Such massive outflows are not just a reaction to a price dip, but rather reveal a deep fundamental shift in institutional investors’ behaviour. Those were likely caused by institutions reacting to macroeconomic hurdles in the market, regulatory uncertainty, and risk reduction. Both in February and now, investors also reacted to Trump’s geopolitical moves, as both times he implemented huge trade tariffs on all imports from China.
Besides, spot ETFs serve as a liquidity bridge between institutional capital and crypto markets. Therefore, when this channel starts to reverse, large capital outflows are highly likely to happen.
US government seizes 127,271 Bitcoin
This week, the US government has confiscated a gigantic amount of Bitcoin worth over $14 billion, charging the Prince Group founder with orchestrating a massive cryptocurrency scam. The founder is the UK and Cambodian national Chen Zhi, and he is charged with a wire-fraud conspiracy and money laundering.
The US government (the Department of Justice) seized a staggering 127,271 Bitcoins from that organization in collaboration with UK authorities. According to the DOJ, this was the biggest ever seizure of Bitcoin from criminal groups.
The Bitcoin community hopes that the 127,271 BTC will be added to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve of the US, which already contains 200,000 BTC acquired similarly, by confiscating it from illegal operations.
