Galaxy Research Attributes 1.096 Million Bitcoin (BTC) to Satoshi After 2010 Wallets Move

600 Dormant BTC Move After 16 Years

Twelve Bitcoin (BTC) addresses that had sat untouched since 2010 moved a combined 600 BTC on September 5, 2026, pulling one of crypto's oldest mysteries back into focus: how much of the early supply belongs to Satoshi Nakamoto. The coins were mined in March 2010, when the network's mining reward still stood at 50 BTC per block, and had remained immobile for roughly 16 years. Initial on-chain tracking showed seven miner wallets moving about 350 BTC; a fuller review lifted the total to 12 addresses and 600 coins. The coin age immediately fueled speculation that the funds traced to Bitcoin's anonymous creator. That link has not held up. Block-by-block analysis by the whale-tracking service found no evidence that the transferred rewards were produced by Nakamoto — a distinction on-chain forensics keeps having to re-teach, since “Satoshi-era” coins and “Satoshi's coins” are not the same thing. The transfers landed during a burst of network activity: Bitcoin logged 893,391 transactions on September 6, the fourth-highest daily count in its history. The wallet movements coincided with a fresh accounting of the stash commonly attributed to Nakamoto. Galaxy Research shared the updated estimate, built by examining 50 BTC coinbase rewards generated before the first halving in 2012 and classifying the outputs that were never spent. Of the roughly 10.5 million BTC produced in Bitcoin's earliest proof-of-work years, 33,995 unspent 50 BTC outputs — about 1.699 million BTC — remain unmoved, and the model attributes roughly 1.096 million BTC, or 64.5%, to Satoshi. The figure is a probabilistic attribution, not a proven balance: Nakamoto's identity is unknown, and whether the private keys behind those outputs remain accessible has never been established. Our read of the data: the 1.096 million BTC figure is best treated as an upper bound on dormant early supply, not as spendable overhang.

Galaxy Research shared the updated estimatehttps://x.com/glxyresearch/status/2097085129243959548

Malone Lam Pleads Guilty in $240M Theft

Court records delivered the other major Bitcoin development of the session. Malone Lam, identified by prosecutors as the lead figure in a ring accused of stealing approximately $240 million in Bitcoin, has pleaded guilty to the organized-crime conspiracy charge filed against him in the United States. The case traces to August 2024, when Lam and accomplices used social engineering — impersonation and targeted deception rather than any technical exploit of the network — to extract more than 4,100 BTC from a single victim. US authorities describe it as one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts in the country's history. The plea posture is concrete: Lam faces a statutory maximum of 20 years in prison, and he is the 11th of 18 defendants charged in the case to admit guilt, per the court record. That pace of cooperation matters. In multi-defendant crypto-theft prosecutions, early guilty pleas typically lock in the factual record — who controlled which wallets, how proceeds moved — and shrink the space for later defenses. For holders, the mechanics are the lesson: a theft of 4,100 BTC succeeded through human targeting of a victim's credentials and communications, not through any weakness in Bitcoin itself. The $240 million figure also frames the scale of the problem: the 4,100 BTC haul stands among the largest losses from a social-engineering scheme recorded in the United States, and the case has taken just over two years from the August 2024 theft to the lead defendant's guilty plea. Prosecutors pursuing the remaining seven defendants will now argue the case with an admitted organizer's conviction already on file. Recovery in such cases is rare and slow, which is why the recent Liquid Network episode, in which attackers returned 3,400 BTC to Blockstream while keeping 598.49, reads as an outlier rather than a template. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

Dormant Supply Meets the Docket

The two threads describe the same early supply from opposite ends. On-chain, the Galaxy model puts the Satoshi-attributed hoard at roughly 1.096 million BTC — coins that have never moved. In court, the Lam docket now records a guilty plea to a conspiracy count carrying a 20-year maximum — the 11th of 18 defendants — over coins taken by deception and now being formally accounted for. COINOTAG's takeaway: neither item moves price on its own, but together they narrow the uncertainty band around long-dormant supply, and the discipline of hodl among pre-2012 coins remains the cleanest evidence that legacy holdings stay out of circulation.