Hey … Could You Transfer Two Billion Dollars For Me?

Hey … Could You Transfer Two Billion Dollars For Me?

Here’s a bit of stress for you. You are given a task of sending four transactions of half a billion dollars each from one account into another. How stressful would that be? How open would this be to an insider threat? Well, it happened on 29 July 2019 with a transfer of 49,755 BTC, and which is worth $474,258,949:

The destination was a wallet which then contained $ 2,268,858,416 [here]:

Within an hour it was off again [here]:

It was in fact one one of four major transfers with a total of or 239,436 BTC. ($2.27 billion). It is difficult to know who owned the wallets, but some think that Xapo had around 700,000 bitcoins in its custody. Coinbase recently aquired Xapo’s custody business — and which is a business which holds crypto assets for customers. The transfer could relate to that. Xapo supported wallets, of which many are stored in physical vaults in Switzerland. These contain the the private keys of customers are held in an offline environment:

The transfers are likely to relate to moving over 514,000 BTC from Xapo clients to Coinbase (worth around $5.3 billion), and will boost Coinbase’s custody to over $8 billion.

Conclusions

Our world of finance is changing. You own things with your private key. But where do you store your key? In a vault in Switzerland.