Thirteen-Year Bitcoin Nap Pays Off: Dormant 2013 Wallet Cashes Out a 60,000% Paper Gain 🐋

A Bitcoin wallet untouched since September 2013 transferred all 411.45 BTC it held, now worth roughly $34 million, to a new address on Sunday at 18:23 UTC, blockchain data from Arkham Intelligence shows. Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $82,780.88 at the time of the move, putting the stash's value at approximately $33.44 million according to Galaxy Research. When the address, beginning with "13Coop," was first funded on Sept. 11, 2013, the cryptocurrency traded around $131, meaning the original cost basis was about $54,000, with Galaxy placing that figure closer to $127 and the resulting paper gain at more than 64,000%.

Galaxy Research has tagged the sending address as "Noah Doe #970," identifying it as one of 39,069 dormant addresses named in a New York lawsuit filed this year by a pseudonymous plaintiff called Noah Doe and two Wyoming companies. The plaintiffs argue the wallets, which collectively hold about 3.8 million BTC, qualify as abandoned property under the state's lost-and-found law despite their inactivity. Galaxy head of research Alex Thorn has said the pace of dormant "Noah Doe" coins moving onchain has been accelerating month over month, and Sunday's transfer further undercuts the lawsuit's premise, as spending the coins required access to the private keys.

Over the years, the wallet saw dozens of micro-deposits worth less than a dollar each, several labeled by Arkham as phishing attempts tied to address-poisoning scams in which trace amounts of crypto, sometimes called "dust," are sent to high-value wallets to trick owners into copying a fraudulent address. Arkham's data also shows a string of those dust deposits flagged by Galaxy as part of a 2025 campaign that embedded messages in tiny Bitcoin transfers to dormant wallets, which it considers groundwork for the abandonment claim. The owner did not fall for the scams, holding the balance untouched through three halvings, the 2017 boom, the 2022 FTX collapse and the launch of spot bitcoin ETFs in 2024.

Sunday's transfer carried a fee of just 337 satoshis, a fraction of a single cent, and landed in a single new address where the coins remain. The recipient has not been identified, and the funds have not been moved to an exchange, a pattern consistent with custodial maintenance rather than an imminent sale. Arkham and Galaxy both noted the receiving address is a modern SegWit format, suggesting a security upgrade.

The awakening is the latest in an unusual series of long-dormant wallets stirring in 2026. Two other addresses dormant for over a decade moved a combined 417 BTC the day before Sunday's transfer, and the week prior a large whale wallet static since the pre-Covid crash migrated its funds. Earlier in October, a wallet from the active line of coins mined in 2010 moved for the first time in 16 years, and in late September roughly $161 million in decade-old Bitcoin was transferred over about two weeks, with one whale moving $377 million after holding through every major market crash since 2020.