An unmarked whale wallet has recently transferred trillions of Shiba Inu tokens to Coinbase, sparking curiosity among market participants.
Whale tracking platform Whale Alert highlighted this transaction in a tweet on June 4, which saw a whale move Shiba Inu tokens worth millions of dollars to the Coinbase Institution wallet. The shift coincided with a continued decline in Shiba Inu’s price, with the token down 2.34% in the past 24 hours.
Whale Shifts 2.85 trillion SHIB
Notably, the transaction happened on Wednesday at exactly 21:24 (UTC). Specifically, the unknown sending address, “0x2e2c,” transferred 2,869,483,918,550 SHIB, worth approximately $36.6 million at the time, to Coinbase Prime, the institutional investor arm of the leading US exchange.
While the community pondered the transaction, The Crypto Basic carried out detailed research and uncovered that there is more to the transaction. For perspective, the 2.89 trillion SHIB ($36.6 million) shift followed a string of other transactions, and the sending wallet was not necessarily unknown, as Whale Alert reported.
What Really Happened
First, analysis from Arkham identified the sending wallet as Wintermute, a prominent market maker. Furthermore, the transaction did not involve Coinbase Prime alone; it originated from the leading custody provider, BitGo.
For context, a BitGo multisignature wallet, “0x808,” transferred 2.9 trillion SHIB ($37 million) to Wintermute the same day but at an earlier time, specifically at 20:53 (UTC). Interestingly, the movements involved other assets besides SHIB; the BitGo wallet also sent 16,650 ETH ($43.5 million), which also ended up on Coinbase.
Shiba Inu Shift Involving Wintermute
This flow of funds indicates that Wintermute simply pulled funds from the custody platform BitGo and shifted them to Coinbase Prime. There are several reasons market makers make these kinds of moves, including trading purposes.
When a market maker needs to execute trades or provide liquidity on an exchange, they transfer funds from a secure custody account to the exchange. This shows that Wintermute simply moved the Shiba Inu and Ethereum to Coinbase Institutional, where active trading and market-making occur.
Meanwhile, movements of the Shiba Inu token of this magnitude are not new, and do not typically have significant impacts on price. For instance, The Crypto Basic reported a transaction where a wallet labelled “GnosisSafeProxy” shifted 3.36 trillion SHIB to an unidentified wallet.
A report revealed that Crypto.com transferred a staggering 32.47 trillion SHIB, stunning the crypto community. However, The Crypto Basic later uncovered it was just an internal shuffle to its deposit address.
Shiba Inu trades at $0.00001281 at the time of writing.
