A whale moved $2bn in bitcoin 540 times in a short time frame

[BTCtester.com]

On Sep 10 someone consolidated bitcoin from 829 addresses into address 32ZHZYwYATJj8jtoFvUQ9HEz7UoWnLgG5U then he moved the 45.5k BTC 540 times with 720 cash outs (total 1k BTC) at 26 exchanges and on Sep 14 he split the remaining 44.5 BTC again into 51 addresses. From the new addresses similar behavior continues.

This is a strange behavior. A smart money launderer would probably not co-spend 829 addresses. And a honest person likely would not do 540 transactions for cashing out because one typo or software error could move the $2bn unintentional as fee to a miner and he could have done this in one or two transactions.

What's your thought?

P.S:
This demonstrates how easy tracing bitcoin is and that a scammer has no reason to sleep well even not after years. As a first indicator for traceability one can use the Bitcoin privacy score of any BTC address, the lower the score the better your chances to find traces to exchanges where the scammers funds can be frozen.

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[NeuroticFish]

What's your thought?

It has occurred to me that the "whale" may be a business - possibly a mixing business - and all you've done there were consolidations and withdrawals and customers' money going in all the directions, including exchanges.
How about that?

[Bitcoin_Arena]

On Sep 10 someone consolidated bitcoin from 829 addresses into address 32ZHZYwYATJj8jtoFvUQ9HEz7UoWnLgG5U then he moved the 45.5k BTC 540 times with 720 cash outs (total 1k BTC) at 26 exchanges and on Sep 14 he split the remaining 44.5 BTC again into 51 addresses. From the new addresses similar behavior continues.

It's not a whale. It's an exchange consolidating all the UTXOs and then probably cashing out people's withdrawals. I don't see anything special there.

The exchange is FTX - https://oxt.me/transaction/fc10b4f216e2407d533422894989be3ad3781ef6eff91cf2385f3d2befc53cd9
Have a closer look

This is a strange behavior. A smart money launderer would probably not co-spend 829 addresses. And a honest person likely would not do 540 transactions for cashing out because one typo or software error could move the $2bn unintentional as fee to a miner and he could have done this in one or two transactions.

What's your thought?

What makes you think someone was money laundering?  

Exchanges and other Bitcoin accepting services such as online casinos carry out such types of consolidation transactions every other day.

[Stalker22]

What's your thought?

I think you still have much to learn about blockchain transactions and wallets, as well as how exchanges and other blockchain-based services operate.
Just because someone is consolidating a large number of UTXOs doesn’t mean it’s money laundering or some kind of scam. As others have mentioned, exchanges and large crypto casinos do this all the time.

[worldofcoins]

There could be many reasons if the owner of that BTC address(s) did that most commonly as the first user said "Mixing service"

But just because someone is moving their funds that way doesn't really mean that they're doing something illegal.
It could be a way for them to avoid attention on their trades.

[Dave1]

Yep, nothing suspicious with this move, as others said, it's part of a big business, mixing services, gambling platforms etc. So I will say that this is a normal bitcoin movement and has been practice by the said businesses.

If this is a scammer, who is very knowledgeable, he won't this kind of stupid move, he will probably used tumblers to hide and obfuscate his track and footprints.

[maju69]

Are you exploring Blockchain transactions because you are tempted to see sharp declines, which makes you curious to investigate Bitcoin transactions? even though the attraction of Bitcoin in large quantities has often happened and is a fairly common thing. It's just that you come once to check transactions at an urgent time. Would this be taken as a conclusion that the market will rest and the whales will begin to sleep for a long time?

[Leviathan.007]

That's nothing new in bitcoin transactions, this can be a wallet belong to some gambling services because they are usually not legal in their own country so doing this will help them to save their privacy. This can be bitcoin mixing services, also. We even saw transactions with much more amount of bitcoins transferring for more than 2-3 days. However, this can be a reason to say that's some sort of illegal activity such as money laundering if you explore and monitor bitcoin transactions for some a few hours you will find more transactions this one you mentioned here.

[zanezane]

I don't think a money launderer would use bitcoin for their purposes, bitcoin can be tracked by the authorities and they welcome launderers to use it because it makes their work much more easier. They would likely to use privacy coin or just straight up fiat.

[DaveF]

As others have said, looking at it, it's 95% certain to be an exchange.
They took all their inputs and now customers are withdrawing and they are shrinking the wallet.

I am saying most likely an exchange since most casinos tend to send out their payouts at scheduled intervals and in batches.
This looks like people just withdrawing over time.

-Dave

[icopress]

As others have said, looking at it, it's 95% certain to be an exchange.
They took all their inputs and now customers are withdrawing and they are shrinking the wallet.

I am saying most likely an exchange since most casinos tend to send out their payouts at scheduled intervals and in batches.
This looks like people just withdrawing over time.

Or FTX has begun to reorganize its payment structure, in the spirit of Coinbase. Indeed, a couple of months ago, within the framework of the next round of financing, FTX received 900m, part of which was spent on buying back their shares from Binance, and part of the funds, as announced, they used for scaling and reorganization. I am not good at recognizing cold BTC addresses to summarize, but I think logically speaking, we can assume that this is the fulfillment of promises.

[hugeblack]

Someone who wants to launder money will not make things suspicious, but will try to do so in secrecy, so it is unlikely that he will be someone who wants to launder money.

Lots of platforms tend to reduce network fees by consolidating all outputs into one address (input) and thus cheaper to make withdrawals rather than doing so with many inputs. AKA batching process.

I also don't think mixing services will aggregate all their addresses into a central address, that would make them much easier to track.