Bitcoin‘s earliest mined coins are once again drawing attention, with fresh onchain clues pointing to a 1.096 million BTC stash of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. This comes after a major reawakening of 50 BTC wallets, including seven dormant wallets that were activated on September 5, 2026.
According to Whale Alert, seven dormant addresses containing 50 BTC were awakened after 16.5 years. This unusual move has caught the attention of analysts, especially given increased activity in the Bitcoin market.
Galaxy Research stated in an X post on Monday that Bitcoin recently had its fourth-highest daily transaction count in history, with 893,391 transactions exceeding the 99th percentile of its historical range.
Satoshi stash may account for 64.5% of unspent rewards
According to Galaxy Research, before the first halving on November 28, 2012, 10.5 million BTC was issued across 210,000 blocks.
Each of those blocks resulted in 50 BTC outputs. The Bitcoin block reward in its early days (before the first halving event) was 50 BTC per block. In this context, Coinbase BTC output refers to the destination and amount of newly created Bitcoin and transaction fees paid to a miner as a block reward.
Galaxy Research analysts deem 172,042, or 83.5% of these 50 BTC “Coinbase” UTXOs, to have been spent. The vast majority of these were spent before 2014, according to Galaxy, which provided a chart showing the number of 50 BTC coinbase UTXOs awakened per year.
Based on this same data, Galaxy Research analysts deduced 33,995 ’50 BTC’ coinbase outputs as those that remain unspent, accruing to 1.699 million BTC.
Of these, 21,922 ’50 BTC’ Coinbase outputs accruing to 1.096 million BTC are thought to have been mined by Satoshi. This accounts for 64.5% of unspent ’50 BTC’ Coinbase outputs.
According to reports, the ‘Patoshi miner’—the name given to an entity that mined about 1.1 million Bitcoin during Bitcoin’s first year and a half (2009–2010), widely believed to be Satoshi Nakamoto—was turned off in May 2010.
The timing of the shutdown, the mining behavior, the steady decrease in mining speed, and the lack of spending might suggest that Satoshi was only interested in growing and protecting the young Bitcoin network. Given this, it is unlikely that the remainder will ever be spent.
