Bitcoin whale moves $1 billion for $4 as transaction fee hikes

A Bitcoin whale transferred more than $1 billion worth of BTC for a transaction fee of four dollars.

A Bitcoin whale transferred 92,857 BTC ($1.09 billion) from one unknown wallet to another unknown wallet for a fee of four dollars. Although the four dollars transaction fee seems little, it represents a huge hike from last month.

Bitcoin whales

First reported by Twitter crypto bot Whale Alert, the user moved more than one billion dollars worth of Bitcoin for a fee of just four dollars. The funds were moved between two unknown addresses i.e. they are not known to belong to any institution or a cryptocurrency exchange.

Whale Alert’s website also shows other details regarding the transaction, including the hash and the Timestamp.

Whale transactions are common in the cryptocurrency markets, especially when it comes to the largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Many people use cryptocurrencies to transfer large sums due to the relatively low transaction fee they charge. As Cryptopolitan previously reported, a whale transaction was detected on July 28th when the price of BTC was rising towards the $11,000 mark.

The blockchain ledger is public and can be viewed by the people. As such large-scale transactions are often reported across social media platforms such as Twitter.

A crypto whale is an investor who is holding a large amount of a particular cryptocurrency. Subsequently, a Bitcoin whale is an investor holding a large sum of BTC in his possession.

Transaction fee hike

The transaction fee for the Bitcoin blockchain has increased by nearly 540 percent over the last 30 days, according to Bitinfocharts data. The average transaction fee on July 5 was reported to be around $0.835. Yesterday, the same metric was $5.35.

This might be due to the increased activity on the blockchain that shows a significant rise in the total transaction size waiting to be confirmed. The number has surged from 10 million Bytes to 48 million Bytes. As such, traders need to pay a higher sum to have their transactions prioritized.