A $377M Bitcoin Whale Wakes up While Another Dumps BTC for Ether

Whale No. 1: What Woke Up?

Onchain tracker Lookonchain reported that another Bitcoin OG had woken up, transferring out all of their 4,582 BTC ($377.58M). The coins arrived in one 4,581.94 BTC transfer on Aug. 7, 2024, and sat there for more than two years. At 6:37 p.m. UTC on Oct. 12, the full stack left in a single transaction split into five pieces:

• Four outputs of exactly 1,000 BTC
• One of 581.94 BTC

Each one went to a fresh address and all five receiving addresses had no prior history. Moreover, as of Tuesday morning, not a single satoshi had been spent.

From the outside looking in, the 1,000 BTC lots look more like custody restructuring or an over-the-counter (OTC) desk preparing a sale than a panicked market dump. Also, the dump was not an isolated event given that last week, a separate wallet moved 4,500 BTC ($375.72 million) after more than four years of inactivity.

Lastly, Bitcoin.com News has tracked such movements all year long, with dormant holders unleashing billions in aged BTC across 2026.

Whale No. 2: Why Sell Bitcoin at a Loss?

The second whale’s movements are easier to read, because the individual seems to be making a clear bet. Onchain analyst EmberCN first spotted the wallet selling 410.1 BTC on Hyperliquid for about $34.13 million in USDC and turning that into 13,527 ETH at $2,523. Those coins had been withdrawn from the HTX exchange between March and June 2025 at an average cost of $95,434.

The whale didn’t stop there and by early Tuesday, the entity had sold 837.8 BTC in total and bought 27,500 ETH ($69.68 million) at an average of $2,534. The route was elaborate, i.e. BTC into Hyperliquid, sold for USDC, USDC withdrawn to Arbitrum, bridged to Ethereum, then swapped for ETH onchain.

Analyst Ai Yi (ai_9684xtpa) put the tally at 837.78 BTC into 27,501 ETH at a 0.03046 exchange rate, and the wallet cluster is public on Arkham.

410.1 BTC at a $95,434 cost basis is about $39.1 million, and the sale brought back roughly $34.1 million, a realized loss of around $5 million, or 13%. The whale took that hit to switch horses, not to cash out.

The Ratio Both Whales Are Staring At

The rotation runs straight into a technical line as Ai Yi noted that ETH/BTC fell below 0.03 for the first time since Aug. 19, the date the analyst marks as the start of this leg of the market.

Bitcoin’s price backdrop may also be able to explain part of the urgency as the asset slipped under $82,000 on Monday night as $406M in longs were wiped out, before bouncing back above $83,500 on Tuesday. Institutional flows haven’t helped either side, with bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) shedding $1.2 billion last week.

The ether buyer is not alone in its conviction as Tom Lee’s Bitmine recently surpassed 6M ETH, closing in on 5% of supply, a corporate bid that ETH bulls point to whenever the ratio sags.