$5B Bitcoin whale makes massive pivot into Ethereum

An old whale with around $5B in BTC holdings has been rotating into ETH in the past week. The closely watched wallet moved another $1.1B worth of BTC, sending the funds to Hyperunit. 

The crypto market is watching one of the most notable whale rotations between BTC and ETH. One of the older wallets, with $5.5B in BTC reserves, has been moving the coins after years of holding. 

The whale already built a sizeable ETH reserve valued at $2.5B in the past week, as the price of BTC weakened, while ETH retained its value. 

Arkham Intelligence noticed another large-scale transfer from some of the whale’s known addresses. 

BREAKING: $5 BILLION BTC WHALE BUYING UP TO $1 BILLION $ETH

A whale holding over $5B of BTC is currently buying $ETH. He just moved $1.1 BILLION of BTC to a new wallet and has started purchasing ETH through Hyperunit/HL.

This whale bought $2.5 BILLION of ETH last week, and… pic.twitter.com/cMQWrYBmZb

— Arkham (@arkham) August 29, 2025

One of the addresses was used as an intermediary to move 10,000 BTC. The transfer originated from a reserve wallet, which holds another $1.6B in BTC. The whale’s reserves contain another $3.5B in an address that was last active a week ago. 

The last address was emptied out in late August, with only dust amounts of BTC remaining. As a whole, the whale has a remaining balance of over 14,495 BTC on the largest wallet. 

On-chain data shows the main entity withdrew 85,947 BTC from HTX, OKX, the ViaBTC mining pool, the Bixin mining pool, as well as Binance, with some of the coins aged up to 8 years. The holdings did not move during the bear market, but became active only during the 2025 price cycle.

Whale moved funds as ETH doubled in value in BTC terms

The move of funds happened below the BTC peak, but just as ETH was showing more decisive strength. Little is known about the whale, except one of the addresses has been cited on social media in connection to now-deleted meme coin content. 

The whale’s funds initially originated from the HTX exchange, first funded five years ago. The whale is not ancient, but the holdings belonged to the 3-5 year cohort, which has shown readiness to avoid panic-selling. Despite the long holding period, the whale is hardly a maximalist. 

The whale rotated into ETH as the token was trading at a one-month high against BTC, after months of trading around 0.020 BTC. ETH doubled its value against the leading coin, despite expectations of a permanent slide to a lower range. ETH is still down from its peak of over 0.08 BTC.

BTC whale built both spot and futures positions on ETH

The signature move of the whale is the usage of Hyperliquid’s spot market to shift between BTC and ETH. Despite this, the whale’s move caused at least $4,000 drop in the price of BTC in the past week, adding to the downward pressure. At the same time, the whale adds to the overall interest in building ETH reserves. As Cryptopolitan reported, the whale’s moves added to the growing ETH scarcity.

Before the latest transfer, the whale held 220,451 ETH. This would make the whale the owner of the fifth-largest ETH treasury. The next purchase will probably push the whale’s holdings above the reserves of the Ethereum Foundation. 

The recent rollover into spot ETH and Hyperliquid positions points to two main entities, most probably with the same person or service controlling them, based on using a similar strategy through Hyperliquid. 

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