Bitcoin worth $1.5B withdrawn from Coinbase in 48 hours

[Beparanf]

Can anyone confirm that this is a transaction from Coinbase to an external wallet, or is it an internal transaction? It wouldn't be the first time that panic was created around such transactions, only to find out later that the funds still remained with the same company, just at a different coin address.

In addition, Coinbase has announced that it keeps about 2 million BTC in its possession, so if it is correct or approximately correct, I ask the question, what does 5% mean in the bigger picture? Spreading panic should not be something serious members of this forum deal with - and this topic is nothing but exactly that.

Partly confirmed since the balance on Coinbase wallet decreases as per the graph shown on the article. The balance will be just the same if the withdrawal is just an internal transfer besides many says that this is just a show off from Coinbase to give confidence to there user that they can still handle huge amount withdrawal without a problem since they lately boast that they are holding huge amount of Bitcoin according to there CEO tweet.

Those Bitcoin is being tracked already and let’s see if this will just came back unspent to confirm the theory. I doubt too that this wallet belongs to a whale, It’s either it’s coinbase own balance or other exchange balance that pull out in there.

[Victorik]

What I don't understand is how can someone be holding such amount of BTC in an exchange and still sleep at night?
Considering the inherent risk attached to keeping tokens on exchange, I will say it is rather unwise to leave your funds in an exchange, no matter how secure they claim to be.

Some people still will never learn their lessons, they prefer to learn the hard way.

[DaveF]

So more then likely some big institution pulled their coins out, probably to calm their investors. Proving that they have it and it is safe. Not a big deal, and between the article and what we have discussed here spent more time discussing a non event then it's worth.

If, picking on a random brokerage, E*Trade pulled a bunch of cash out of one bank to bring it in house it would not even make the press.
If a investment fund switched some back end stuff around as to who held their investments if they did not do it in house it might make a line or 2 of text in places like Bloomberg.

-Dave

[Z-tight]

Some people still will never learn their lessons, they prefer to learn the hard way.

Peole choose 'convenience' over the safety of their coins, there was a topic i read here the other day about self custody being more difficult to achieve than third party custody, that is the idea that a lot of people have and so they sleep well because they think the third party service is their safest option in keeping their BTC.

Self custody isn't difficult, the only requirement is responsibility, and just the way only the owner of a property or something can care for it in the best way possible, that is the way only a BTC owner can show full responsibility in keeping their BTC safe, if you give your BTC to a third party service to keep for you, you now have to trust them when you know nothing about them or what is going on behind the scenes, but when you keep it yourself, you are liable to yourself and if your funds are 'dear' to you you'll keep them safe without encountering any problems.

[Yatsan]

Well, for sure people will have impressions such as whales withdrawing their assets but as we can see on the market price, it didn't fill red marks which should have tickle a bit. Meaning, the amount was just transfered probably on their wallet. If we won't use our comprehension, this might cause FUD towards small investors therefore we should not emphasize such thing to avoid misconceptions and panic.

What I don't understand is how can someone be holding such amount of BTC in an exchange and still sleep at night?
Considering the inherent risk attached to keeping tokens on exchange, I will say it is rather unwise to leave your funds in an exchange, no matter how secure they claim to be.

Some people still will never learn their lessons, they prefer to learn the hard way.

Whale things I guess?  They are simply comfortable with this industry for being in years. Coinbase on the other hand is a trusted exchanger. But maybe he just made sure of things given that what happened recently, rarely occur. So he probably eliminated the risk of losing money due to negligence. As long as he won't sell it, the amount will continue 'living'. He might be planning to rest that amount for months or even year until the market recover.

[franky1]

What I don't understand is how can someone be holding such amount of BTC in an exchange and still sleep at night?

grey scale gave 635,000 btc to coinbase.. and coinbase has terms of service to not tell greyscale or greyscale customers where the proof of reserves is.. ..

[o_e_l_e_o]

there was a topic i read here the other day about self custody being more difficult to achieve than third party custody

Isn't it amazing that centralized exchanges have managed to convince people that writing down 12 words is outside of their capacity, and they need to give all their coins to complete strangers instead.

that is the idea that a lot of people have and so they sleep well because they think the third party service is their safest option in keeping their BTC.

Pretty much every centralized exchange has lost coins in a hack at some point, so such an opinion is just provably wrong. Or take a look at FTX as a shining example - one of the biggest crypto exchange in existence, and court documents show that they were storing private keys on an unsecured group email account. This is the kind of "security" you get with centralized exchanges.

[Die_empty]

there was a topic i read here the other day about self custody being more difficult to achieve than third party custody

Isn't it amazing that centralized exchanges have managed to convince people that writing down 12 words is outside of their capacity, and they need to give all their coins to complete strangers instead.

that is the idea that a lot of people have and so they sleep well because they think the third party service is their safest option in keeping their BTC.

Pretty much every centralized exchange has lost coins in a hack at some point, so such an opinion is just provably wrong. Or take a look at FTX as a shining example - one of the biggest crypto exchange in existence, and court documents show that they were storing private keys on an unsecured group email account. This is the kind of "security" you get with centralized exchanges.

People like pushing their responsibilities to someone or an organization. But the recent happenings involving exchanges have made people wake up and take the responsibility of safely keeping their keys and learning how to pay attention to details.

One of the impediment to avoiding or boycotting the use of these exchanges are the difficulties encountered when converting bitcoin to fiat. Some local currencies or country are not listed in some of these decentralized exchange platforms and P2P trading have not developed in some countries. Like in my location we are trying to build a viable bitcoin community that would promote P2P transactions. I am sure in a few years centralized exchanges would have less influence in my locality.

[Lucius]

Spreading panic should not be something serious members of this forum deal with - and this topic is nothing but exactly that.

I don't see it that way. Rather, it is a good sign that more and more people are finally waking up to the mistake that is centralized exchanges and are pulling their money off said exchanges.

I would still agree here with the opinion expressed by @DaveF, because the transactions in question are certainly not related to with the fact that ordinary people have finally opened their eyes and realized that the exchange is not a bank, but rather the move of some extremely rich individual or company. If it encourages many others to do the same, that would be something worth discussing - but the fact is that CEX has millions of BTC in their possession according to what they are announcing these days - or maybe they are lying to us about it?

[Slow death]

Amazingly enough binance and others affiliated with FTX are still plying their wares, in the hope of attracting investor capital.

taking advantage of what you mentioned about binance, is anyone here managing to get into binace? for me it just looks like this:

https://www.binance.com/en/trade/LTC_USDT



what is happening with binance that every day is like this, I do not see any information on their twitter, I have tried all my browsers and it does the same thing, I have already turned off the computer several times, I have even tested it with VPN and nothing, what is happening? I hope it's nothing serious or is this just on my side?

What I don't understand is how can someone be holding such amount of BTC in an exchange and still sleep at night?

I would also like to get inside these people's heads and try to understand all of this, but apparently because they are very rich people they are no longer afraid when it comes to dealing with a lot of money, if they are hacked targets they know they won't be arrested, so they can afford to sleep well because even by law they could not be arrested when a hacker steals money from their exchange, the worst that could happen would be for them to pay a fine, in my country I would be liable for the crime of irresponsibility and would take leave of absence and would have to compensate all people

[stompix]

Partly confirmed since the balance on Coinbase wallet decreases as per the graph shown on the article. The balance will be just the same if the withdrawal is just an internal transfer besides many says that this is just a show off from Coinbase to give confidence to there user that they can still handle huge amount withdrawal without a problem since they lately boast that they are holding huge amount of Bitcoin according to there CEO tweet.

Nothing is confirmed at all.

This graph is just showing the number of coins held by addresses that are confirmed or at least believed to be owned and in control of Coinbase.
With this comes two problems, we don't know for sure those wee Coinbase addresses, we don't know all the addresses owned by Coinbase and we don't know if they haven't just moved a few of their coins from the cold storage to Coinbase Custody, which is actually holding most of the coins owned by big investors who pay Coinbase to take care of their coins. What the graph shows is you taking $100 out of your wallet, the one observing this doesn't know for sure how much more you have just a quick peak, how much you have in your pockets and it also doesn't know if after pulling out that 100$ it didn't just go in your wife's wallet.

The other problem with this is that for years I've been hearing of people pulling and pulling coins from Coinbase so that graph continuously sowing only withdrawals and not going into a negative is another of those miraculous analyses only glassnode is capable of.

what is happening with binance that every day is like this, I do not see any information on their twitter, I have tried all my browsers and it does the same thing, I have already turned off the computer several times, I have even tested it with VPN and nothing, what is happening? I hope it's nothing serious or is this just on my side?

Works fine here, you tried this on a desktop or smartphone?

[o_e_l_e_o]

but the fact is that CEX has millions of BTC in their possession according to what they are announcing these days - or maybe they are lying to us about it?

It's certain that some exchanges are lying about how much they have in reserve, but you are right - they still hold millions of bitcoin. But if you look at some independent data such as the Glassnode graphs presented in OP's article, or this from Glassnode, it does show huge outflows from exchanges and the total balance being held on exchanges to be the lowest it's been in over 4 years.

As long as centralized exchanges exist there will be people who are dumb enough to leave their coins on them, but we should be happy to see that number reducing.

I hope it's nothing serious or is this just on my side?

I don't have an account so I can't try to log in, but the link you have provided loads normally for me on Tor.

[Lucius]

It's certain that some exchanges are lying about how much they have in reserve, but you are right - they still hold millions of bitcoin.

I'm just interested in how far these lies go, because in the case of Coinbase, I remember that we had several discussions on the forum about which CEX has the most BTC in its possession, and at the beginning of 2020 some estimates were that Coinbase had a little less than 1 million BTC. Now, a little less than 3 years later and everything that happened in the meantime, Coinbase claims to have even 2 million BTC - and all the time we read about "huge outflows from exchanges".

According to a report published by data source xxx, Coinbase’s cold wallets contained roughly 970,000 BTC, worth about $8 million, at the beginning of this year. A graph shared with xxx readers shows that the exchange’s bitcoin holdings have been growing steadily.

In a series of tweets, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the largest US-based crypto exchange platform holds about 2 million BTC, which translates to $33.12 billion at Bitcoin’s current price of $16,561.

As long as centralized exchanges exist there will be people who are dumb enough to leave their coins on them, but we should be happy to see that number reducing.

I hope that people's habits will change, especially after what happened with FTX and before that with the so-called stablecoin from Kwon, or with dozens of smaller CEXs that failed in one way or another in the last ten years.

[Flexystar]

That is good thing isn't it?

Finally they might have decided to invest some money into buying Ledger Hardware wallet for their Bitcoins. 
Up until now they might be lazy enough for not buying it Or they were just buying and buying without any second thought to exchangers security.

This is definitely reaction to the FTX incidence only. I think FTX was amazing lesson for every crypto user and at the same time it was the most expensive one!

Now let's just hope that others will also follow it as positive vibe rather than selling with FOMO reaction to the high volume movement like this. By the way that is one crazy rich guy out there. 

[Leviathan.007]

This can a piece of good news if you consider the same situation on other exchanges because withdrawing huge amounts of bitcoin from exchanges shows us that people are not really trying to sell their bitcoin but prefer holding their bitcoins that's why they prefer to hold their inside their wallets instead of depositing the bitcoin exchanges for selling all these can be a good positive signal for bitcoin price to reach higher targets.

[Kakmakr]

I have another take on this....

People know the risk of holding coins on an exchange (well most of them) but they have to keep them on there for their trades and trading bots to function.

I think the reason why so many people withdrawn their coins, has more to do with the fear of the repercussions of the FTX incident. (They know there will be some kind of over reaction from the regulators all over the world, so they withdraw the coins to avoid those counter measures) 

There is no need to panic, most of those coins are in cold storage... ready to be deposited ..when the market recovers and the regulators calmed down. 

[glendall]

in this case . it's better for people to trust private wallets more than saving on centralized exchanges because they are not banks and the level of risk of loss is very large in my opinion,
and I think it is normal for owners to withdraw their funds to their personal wallets,
coinbase shouldn't need to make news like this, because it will have a negative effect on centralized exchanges enough FTX and binance are making noise in the exchange world.

[kryptqnick]

I am happy that people are withdrawing their BTC from centralized exchanges. This means that something changed in the public opinion, and while surely people have heard 'not your keys, not your coins', way more people are taking it seriously now. I understand why prior to FTX some ignored it: if a company's reputable and convenient, surely the chance of you losing your money there because of it being a centralized exchange, right? Apparently, the chance is much higher than many anticipated, and if one of the biggest exchanges can go down, others don't seem safe anymore either.

[buwaytress]

What I don't understand is how can someone be holding such amount of BTC in an exchange and still sleep at night?

I met someone back in 2017 who only bought Bitcoin on exchanges (in Europe, so it wasn't even a big exchange). He couldn't sleep at night knowing no one was going to be there to hold his hand and guide him through if he'd lost his password to his wallet like I showed him too, let alone private keys or seed phrase. Regularly loses his email passwords, apparently, and keeps multiple copies of housekeys, carkeys, etc.

So I get it, Bitcoin self custody wasn't for him. At least, I said his wife should know, but that went down a whole different route, and myself haven't figured out how to get my family/next of kin to properly use either. Unfortunate, but it's actually not difficult to imagine why people still flock to exchanges. If I were as rich as Coinbase guy, I'd probably also have private insurance.

[arabspaceship123]

So more then likely some big institution pulled their coins out, probably to calm their investors. Proving that they have it and it is safe. Not a big deal, and between the article and what we have discussed here spent more time discussing a non event then it's worth.

If, picking on a random brokerage, E*Trade pulled a bunch of cash out of one bank to bring it in house it would not even make the press.
If a investment fund switched some back end stuff around as to who held their investments if they did not do it in house it might make a line or 2 of text in places like Bloomberg.

-Dave

It's only making news because it's cryptocurrencies. If bitcoin wasn't moved it'd be a regular transaction in the business world. It wouldn't make headlines. Cryptocurrencies shouldn't be moved to exchanges.

there was a topic i read here the other day about self custody being more difficult to achieve than third party custody

Isn't it amazing that centralized exchanges have managed to convince people that writing down 12 words is outside of their capacity, and they need to give all their coins to complete strangers instead.

I'm not amazed they've convinced people to trust them because that's how they make money. These people should learn about about alternatives to exchanges. They require educating because it's easy to use Electrum.

that is the idea that a lot of people have and so they sleep well because they think the third party service is their safest option in keeping their BTC.

Pretty much every centralized exchange has lost coins in a hack at some point, so such an opinion is just provably wrong. Or take a look at FTX as a shining example - one of the biggest crypto exchange in existence, and court documents show that they were storing private keys on an unsecured group email account. This is the kind of "security" you get with centralized exchanges.

If exchanges haven't been hacked they've been attacked with attempted hacks. If you're trusting exchanges you don't hold private keys, you're relying on their security. Their failures will lead to hacks.

Exchange owners storing private keys in company emails isn't appropriate, it's what FTX did, other exchanges are professional with stronger security but it doesn't make sense to trust them.