Category: Business

A batch of 100.02 Bitcoin mined in July 2010, from a period commonly known as the Satoshi-era, moved on Wednesday for the first time in 16 years.

At roughly $83,000 per coin, the stash was worth about $8.3 million when it left. Based on Bitbo’s highest registered price of BTC in 2010, the stash was worth around $29 when it was mined.

The transaction was confirmed at 18:52 UTC in block 970,379—one of the batches of transactions that Bitcoin’s network stamps onto its public ledger roughly every 10 minutes. It split the coins between two new addresses, an address being the string of characters that works like an account number: 10 BTC went to one and 90.02 BTC to the other.

The holder paid a fee of 1,467 satoshis—a satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin—which came to about $1.22 for moving $8.3 million. Both destinations are modern bc1q addresses, a format that did not exist when the coins were mined. Nothing in the transaction identifies the owner, and moving coins between addresses is not the same as selling them.

Both pieces were mined within days of each other: 50.02 BTC in block 70,522 on July 26, 2010, and 50 BTC in block 70,748 on July 28. The two payouts were merged into a single transaction on July 30, 2010, landing in the address that just moved them.

Nobody knew it back then, but 2010 turned out to be a special year for Bitcoin. A Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz had paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, a bill of about $41. Today, the stash has grown more than a millionfold since.

BitcoinBTC · USD

$83,238−4.11%

24H7D1M1YYTD

Oct 2Oct 4Oct 6Oct 7Oct 9

$86.7k$84.7k$82.7k$80.7k

24h HighHigh$83,398

24h LowLow$80,427

VolVol$1.6B

Market projectionsOdds by Myriad

→

$50$100$500

Buy

The mining reward has been cut in half four times since, most recently to 3.125 BTC in the April 2024 halving, a scheduled event that repeats roughly every four years. A block mined today pays one-sixteenth of what those two blocks did.

The address itself has not been idle: it sent out 100 BTC twice on August 8, 2015, 100 BTC in December 2017 and 249 BTC in March 2018. Those were other coins—Bitcoin tracks money as individual chunks, a bit like bills, so an address can spend some while others sit untouched. Galaxy tracks the coins rather than the address, and says these particular coins had not moved since 2010.

Coins from Bitcoin’s first years are called Satoshi-era, after the network’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and they have been waking up in clusters. In February 2025, a 50 BTC batch valued at $0.10 per coin when mined moved after about 15 years, by then worth roughly $5 million. The holder skipped a test transaction—a small trial transfer people usually send first to make sure the destination works.

In August, 49.97 BTC first received in July 2011, when Bitcoin traded under $15, moved after about 15 years and went on to a wallet that Arkham, a blockchain analytics platform, labeled as FalconX, a prime broker serving trading firms. The label alone does not confirm a sale.

Between August 16 and 26, six wallets dormant since 2011, 2012 or 2014 moved 553.59 BTC, about $40 million. Two carried tags tied to a New York lawsuit that asks a court to declare 39,069 dormant addresses abandoned property.

As of Thursday, the 10 BTC and 90.02 BTC were still sitting in their new addresses, with nothing sent onward. So, Bitcoin holders, you can breathe: this whale is not dumping their coins—yet.

The NFL has picked a side in the fight over sports prediction markets, and it isn’t Kalshi’s.

In an amicus brief filed Thursday, the league urged the Supreme Court to take up New Jersey’s appeal of a Third Circuit ruling. That ruling found Kalshi’s sports event contracts are “swaps” under the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction, shielding them from state gambling laws.

The Sixth and Ninth Circuits have ruled the opposite way, creating a split only the high court can resolve. Kalshi and prediction market rivals such as Polymarket have long faced pushback from state regulators. (Disclosure: Decrypt‘s parent company Dastan operates Myriad, a prediction market unavailable to U.S. residents.)

The NFL in its brief sided with the Sixth and Ninth Circuits. It argued that Dodd-Frank’s definition of a swap covers instruments that hedge existing risk, not bets that create new risk, which means sports contracts belong under state gambling oversight.

The brief lays out the league’s grievances in detail. The NFL said it asked the CFTC and operators like Kalshi to ban contracts that one person could easily manipulate, that involve injuries or officiating, or whose outcomes are knowable in advance, but they declined.

It noted that 18-year-olds can trade on Kalshi while most states require sports bettors to be 21, and that the CFTC has just 543 employees nationwide, suggesting the agency is understaffed to handle the task of policing these markets. Without league-specific lists of prohibited bettors, operators’ “nominal insider-trading policies or prohibitions are paper tigers,” the brief says.

BitcoinBTC · USD

$83,246−4.11%

24H7D1M1YYTD

Oct 2Oct 4Oct 6Oct 7Oct 9

$86.7k$84.7k$82.7k$80.7k

24h HighHigh$83,398

24h LowLow$80,427

VolVol$1.6B

Market projectionsOdds by Myriad

→

$50$100$500

Buy

NFL-related contracts accounted for $1.8 billion of the $3.3 billion traded across prediction markets on the season’s first Sunday, according to the brief. The league, represented by former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, wants a ruling before the 2027 season.

It isn’t asking for prediction markets to disappear, though. If the justices side with the Third Circuit, the NFL said it would redouble efforts to persuade the CFTC, operators, and Congress to adopt stronger integrity and consumer protections before then.

Sports gaming attorney Daniel Wallach said the brief “meaningfully increases the chances of a cert grant,” in a post on X.

“It is extremely telling that the sports league which has most forcefully advocated for federal regulation is essentially saying ‘this ain’t it,’” he wrote on X. Wallach noted that former CFTC and SEC Chair Gary Gensler and former Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., both of whom helped pass Dodd-Frank, also filed briefs backing New Jersey.

Other leagues have taken a friendlier approach. MLB named Polymarket its exclusive prediction market sponsor in March and signed an integrity agreement with the CFTC, and the NHL became the first major league to license its trademarks to prediction markets. DraftKings and FanDuel have launched prediction markets of their own.

The stakes keep rising as prediction markets increasingly enter the mainstream. Bernstein analysts see a $10 trillion opportunity in prediction markets, while Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev expects crypto contracts to eventually overtake sports.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says it is “plausible” for artificial intelligence to break encryption within the next two years. As a result, he believes the industry needs to protect itself from AI-vulnerable cryptography, as well as quantum-vulnerable cryptography.

It comes just a day after Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake called on the industry to plan for “bunker mode” by moving funds to addresses whose public keys haven’t been exposed. Drake said that it’s now reasonable to believe AI advances in math could result in encryption breaking before quantum computers become powerful enough to break encryption, commonly referred to as Q-Day.

“There is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math,” Buterin said on X. “If AI will bring us 50 years of math in two years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a […] level of improvement to our ability to break lattices.”

Lattice-based cryptography is an option that some crypto projects, such as Cardano, have considered in an attempt to quantum-proof themselves. That means that users could be moving funds to addresses vulnerable to AI-attacks in the short term, out of fear of avoiding a long-term quantum threat. 

“Potential breaks in cryptography by quantum computers were generally thought to be contained to Elliptic curve cryptography and RSA,” Isabel Foxen Duke, head of Mara Foundation and co-author of BIP-360, told Decrypt. “Breaks in cryptography by classical methods (e.g. those potentially created by AI) could affect types of cryptography that are broadly considered quantum secure (e.g. lattice-based cryptography). If we include concerns about classical breaks in the mix, we have to be even more conservative.”

As a result, Buterin believes that any lattices should significantly increase in size to improve safety. Now, the Ethereum founder thinks that hash-based cryptography is a better route for quantum-proofing, but added that, theoretically, AI-driven math could break hashes too.

“I wouldn’t treat Vitalik’s two-year scenario as a deadline. The post doesn’t demonstrate that these systems have been broken,” Ananda Banerjee, founder of analytics firm Charlie Quant Lab, told Decrypt. “I would prepare carefully rather than rush to move funds.”

Buterin isn’t proposing any drastic measures to prepare for a “plausible” doomsday scenario. He suggests keeping your funds in addresses that haven’t made transactions, as the public key will not have been exposed, which significantly decreases the chances of an attack.

The AI fears come just a month after Buterin said that AI wouldn’t doom crypto security, arguing that security defenses will keep pace. His latest comments may suggest that the industry might’ve been running in slightly the wrong direction.

Bitcoin ETFs lost $484.9 million in a single day on Wednesday, the worst outflow since June 25, according to Decrypt‘s ETF tracker. BlackRock’s IBIT took the biggest hit at $207.7 million, with Fidelity’s FBTC next at $105.1 million.

That one session erased roughly 81% of everything that flowed in over the previous nine, so about two weeks of patient buying went out the door in a day. The funds still sit on $57.8 billion in cumulative net inflows, so while it’s a very bad day for ETFs, it’s not exactly a bank run.

The culprit has little to do with crypto itself and is likely much more related to the macro backdrop. The 30-year Treasury yield climbed to about 5.7% on Wednesday, its highest since 2002, while Brent crude settled around $100 a barrel and stocks slid from record highs. Ship attacks around the Strait of Hormuz keep piling up—at least one a day since Oct. 2—and each one is a reason for oil to stay expensive.

What does that mean for Bitcoin investors? Well, expensive oil feeds inflation, inflation keeps the Federal Reserve hawkish, and a hawkish Fed keeps bond yields high. That gets awkward for an asset that pays no interest: why hold Bitcoin through an ETF when a 10-year Treasury yields more than 5% and doesn’t lose 6% in a few days? That’s the math institutions and big-money investors do regularly, and those calculations move the market.

The Fed raised rates in September for the first time since 2023, and the minutes from their most-recent meeting released Wednesday show most officials expect another hike before year end. Traders, though, remain skeptical of another hike, an October move looks unlikely based on CME Fedwatch odds and prediction markets. CME currently prices the odds of a Fed hike in October at 19.4% while Myriad gives a hike a 17% chance.

Outside of Wall Street, Bitcoin slid as low as $81,749.83 on Thursday, about 6% below the $86,978 peak it hit earlier this week, and longs in the derivatives market took the brunt of it: roughly $429 million in positions were liquidated over 24 hours, 87.5% of them long bets, according to CoinGlass.

BitcoinBTC · USD

$82,706−4.16%

24H7D1M1YYTD

Oct 2Oct 4Oct 5Oct 7Oct 9

$86.8k$84.8k$82.8k$80.7k

24h HighHigh$82,684

24h LowLow$80,427

VolVol$1.6B

Market projectionsOdds by Myriad

→

$50$100$500

Buy

Bitcoin had risen in October six years running until last year, when it fell 3.69%. This year the funds opened October with $321.6 million of inflows over four sessions and are now $163.3 million in the red, with Halloween still 23 days away and plenty of time for things to get spookier.

The Fed meets next on Oct. 27-28 and again on Dec. 8-9, and the September minutes set no date for the next increase.