Exclusive: Bitcoin Gold Selling? Someone Split and Moved 664,000 Bitcoin Gold

Bianews exclusively reported on February 23 that Bitcoin Gold investors may be facing a shock as someone has just transferred about 664,000 Bitcoin Gold (BTG) - a currency that has remained unchanged since the blockchain was separated from the Bitcoin network last year.

On Tuesday, about 664,000 Bitcoin Gold were moved for the first time, the largest single-day increase since November.

As CCN reported, the fork was officially released on October 25, although developers pre-date the blockchain for a few weeks before launching the Bitcoin Gold network in mid-November. Since the network was created through a fork of Bitcoin, all Bitcoin holders received a comparable amount of Bitcoin Gold on the new chain.

Most of these coins were bought up and moved in the first few weeks after the network was launched, followed by a reduction in currency forks over the next three months, which continued until this week.

The development was first reported by Antoine Le Calvez, a data engineer at cryptocurrency startup Blockchain who also created a website to track currency forks. He attributed the transaction to bitcoin storage service Xapo.

While Xapo already distributed airdropped Bitcoin Gold to its customers shortly after the fork in October, the current trades are likely being conducted on behalf of many institutional clients of one or more of the firms.

If the owners of these coins were interested in selling them, they would have been sold at a time when the price of Bitcoin Gold is near its all-time low.

The currency traded above $400 several times in November and December, but it has never achieved the success that bitcoin cash — a fork born out of a long-running ideological disagreement over the future of bitcoin — achieved after it forked in August.

Bitcoin Gold performed quite badly during the recent market correction but experienced a mild recovery before plunging to $74 on Feb. 5.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin Gold’s global average trading price is $127, which would imply a market cap of $2.2 billion and rank Bitcoin Gold as the 20th largest cryptocurrency.

At current market prices, the notional value of 664,000 Bitcoin Gold is approximately $84.3 million. However, data from CoinMarketCap shows that Bitcoin Gold's daily trading volume is only $40 million, which means it would be difficult to dump 664,000 Bitcoin Gold without causing a market crash (if that is the owner's intention).

In fact, the mere fact that these coins have been moved could cause traders to price them in during a sell-off, making them even less valuable than they are currently.