Robinhood owns more Bitcoin than MicroStrategy - Stacked over 115,000 BTC in #3 Whale Wallet! The Puzzle There has been a lot of mystery and speculation recently around the 3rd largest address on the Bitcoin Rich List, the 1P5ZED... It has been noted (4 reasons why the top 15 richest Bitcoin wallets still matter in 2021) that since its creation in February 2019, starting with around 10,000 BTC, this address has been accumulating heavily, quickly climbing up the ranks of the Top 100. It has also been observed that this Bitcoin Whale is pretty good at timing the markets, selling at tops and using the dips as a buying opportunities. Is this Whale holding billions of dollars of Bitcoin - a country, a major institution, or one of the richest people in the world? Nobody had the answer, so I decided to have a look, just in case there's a missing piece of the puzzle lying somewhere in the depths of blockchain history... The Trail Let's start by looking where the initial 10,000 BTC into 1P5ZED came from - 3 separate transactions from address 19Mqjbt (blocks 572774, 562925, 562936) in February of 2019. 19Mqjbt looks like Cold Storage at first glance, with infrequent large deposits of around $1M USD. It was seeded in September of 2018 with over 6000 BTC, all coming from 1FzWLk (blocks 543239, 543488). 1FzWLk looks like a typical Institutional Hot Wallet, with frequent deposits and withdrawals of large amounts, millions and tens of millions of USD transacted daily. Following the trail of transactions further, all of the 6000 BTC that seeded 1FzWLk came in a series of transactions (blocks 543481, 543480, 543479) that originate from 1J37CY, which is conveniently marked as an OKEx Exchange wallet, great! The Dead-end So we now have a trail of transactions that looks like this: OKEx Hot Wallet (1J37CY) -> Institutional Hot Wallet (1FzWLk) -> Old Whale Cold Storage (19Mqjbt) -> New Whale Cold Storage (1P5ZED) Unfortunately, OKEx exchange is as far as address tracking can take us, as we seem to be at a dead-end, again. What else can possibly help us on the Whale Hunt? Let's look at the exact dates the addresses were created and the initial large transfers were made: (1J37CY) -> (1FzWLk Created: 2018-06-06 Transfers: 2018-06-12) -> (19Mqjbt Created: 2018-08-21 Transfers: 2018-09-26 & 2018-09-28) -> (1P5ZED Created: 2019-02-05 Transfers: 2019-02-12 & 2019-02-13) The Doge Shades Are any of these dates familiar to you? Probably not... But for me, the dates in August 2018 and February 2019 were vaguely familiar, like I have focused on them sometime before during address tracking... ROBINHOOD!!! YES, my investigation earlier this year that proved Robinhood Crypto is the Billionaire Dogecoin Whale behind the #1 DH5 DOGE address, as cited by Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance & NY Post – just Google “Dogecoin DH5 Whale” Let's now compare the timestamps of exactly when and how the 2 Whale Cold Storage addresses were prepared - 1P5ZED #3 BTC vs. DH5 #1 DOGE, checking the first 8 transactions side by side. If it's the same entity preparing new cold storage for different cryptos as part of the same security initiative, the dates & times should line up fairly closely: 1P5ZED BTC tx DH5 DOGE tx Time Diff 02-05 18:18 02-05 18:04 14 mins 02-10 13:58 02-10 12:12 2 hours 02-11 14:12 02-11 14:09 3 mins 02-12 13:26 02-12 13:06 20 mins 02-12 13:54 02-12 13:51 3 mins 02-13 11:22 02-13 11:21 1 min 02-13 15:07 02-13 15:05 2 mins 02-13 16:28 02-13 16:37 9 mins Corporate Consistency (except for that lunch break on the 10th) In Action! It would be statistically improbable that we see 2 addresses on 2 different blockchains have 8 transactions follow the exact same pattern on the same dates and at the same times by non-related entities (a purely random collision). Ergo, it must be the same entity - Robinhood Crypto. BTW, this same pattern also holds for the Old Whale Cold Storage addresses - 19Mqjbt for Bitcoin and DMzYxf for Dogecoin - with both Deposit dates and times in August 2018 and withdrawal dates and times in February 2019 matching down to 15 minutes. The Crypto Hood But if it is indeed Robinhood following the exact same pattern of cold storage for BTC and DOGE, wouldn't it also make sense for them to follow the same pattern for the other 5 Cryptos that they offer for trading (ETH, LTC, BCH, ETC, BSV), and shouldn't we see more Top Rich addresses belonging to Robinhood on those blockchains? YES and YES! Let's look at Litecoin's LQTpS3 address, which is now the #2 address on the Litecoin Rich List. And sure enough, the first 8 transactions in this wallet follow the exact same setup pattern that Robinhood's BTC and DOGE wallet's do. Of note to market participants is just how heavily Robinhooders were buying the dip since May 10th, stacking over 1 Million LTC in just 2 months! Same story with the cold storage setup of Bitcoin Cash's BCH #2 address 16Nmka, except this one has been seeded directly from an exchange hot wallet, presumably due to a fairly small starting balance (block: 569639). I guess nobody at Robinhood even cared to set up dedicated cold storage for BCH in 2018! Checking out top Ethereum accounts, we find the #4 address 0x73BCE, the #2 Exchange address after Binance, holding over 2 Million ETH, was seeded in exactly the same manner (keep in mind Etherscan timestamps are in UTC, so adjust by 7 hours to compare to BitInfoCharts) from the previous cold storage at 0x442D1 which was created, you guessed it, on Aug. 24th, 2018. The Checksum If all of the above is indeed Robinhood's holdings, wouldn't the total amount have to match their latest public disclosure of $11.6 Billion total crypto holdings on March 31st 2021? It sure has to! Let's sum up the total balances of Bitcoin (1P5ZED), Ethereum (0x73BCEB) and Dogecoin (DH5) addresses on March 31st, and multiply by the average market price of these coins on March 31st: BTC: 100K BTC * $58,000 = $5.8 B ETH: 1.28M ETH * $1900 = $2.4 B DOGE: 36.7B DOGE * $0.054 = $2 B Which is $10.2 Billion total for the top 3 cryptos on Robinhood, leaving BCH, LTC, BSV and ETC to be the remaining $1.4 Billion - the reader can calculate the exact altcoin composition as math homework. The numbers work and confirm the original hypothesis. Conclusions Robinhood indeed owns more BTC (115K) than MicroStrategy (105K), as a custodian for RH Crypto clients. In aggregate, 10+ million Crypto Robinhooders are actually smart money, heavily buying the Bitcoin and Crypto dip since the crash in May. Wallets are urgently needed to give the freedom of self-custody to millions of RH investors! Hats off to u/UpdootTheDaily who got me started on this investigation and to JeninaCrypto for the original CryptoStars NFT Collection. You can follow yours truly on Twitter at @BitcoinIsThePin for more Decentralization, Autonomy & Freedom content.
Enter the password to open this PDF file:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-