Almost ₦3.24 Trillion ($9 Billion) Worth of Bitcoin Moved On-Chain in 1 Hour: Record

On Dec. 4, $8.9 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) were shifted the blockchain in one single hour, excluding change volume, that will be Bitcoin that returns to the sender.

Bitcoin’s high transaction volume was stated by Rafael Schultze-Kraft, the co-founder of on-chain market intelligence firm Glassnode. In a tweet on Dec. 4, he claimed that this kind of high hourly transaction value was an initial for the network:

“It’s the highest hourly USD transaction volume in Bitcoin’s history.”

Bittrex is in charge of the spike

Schultze-Kraft’s company apparently soon started work to uncover who or the thing that was the reason behind this unusual spike. Earlier on Dec. 5, Glassnode posted on Twitter claims that the spike was due to cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex moving a massive amount Bitcoin multiple times.

Based on the tweet, the exchange performed 21 on-chain transactions within one hour, each that moved around 56,000 BTC (nearly $416 million) for a fee of approximately $0.60. The tweet also contained a connect to data regarding the very first of the transactions.

Interestingly, the transactions took place prior to the exchange’s maintenance scheduled for day. BBNB BuyBitcoins In Nigeria Blog reported on the transactions and Bittrex told the outlet that no hack took place.

While at present it’s still unclear why the transactions took place, some speculate that the main reason might be that funds within the exchange’s cold wallets were moved.

From time to time, Bitcoin’s blockchain shows seemingly anomalous activity that’s explained later. Among the latest examples took devote November, when Bitcoin’s blockchain mempool was at its highest level since January a year ago with no corresponding spike in how many unconfirmed transactions.