Whale tracking service WhaleStats has shared a suspicious $850 million transaction of Dogecoins that might be potentially tied to Elon Musk's announcement about Tesla accepting Dogecoin for merchandise payments.
The large transaction
The transaction that appeared on the Dogecoin blockchain suggests that the anonymous "Jzi13k" has made a large transaction worth almost $1 billion to two addresses. The first address, "y3PvN," has received the major part of the transaction and now currently holds 5.3 billion Dogecoins.
The sender wallet had numerous transactions in its history and might be tied to a cryptocurrency exchange, while the recipient had only one incoming transaction on its sheets.
5,351,593,214 $DOGE ($844,626,000 USD) had been transferred to unknown wallet 1 day 19 hours 6 minutes ago
— WhaleStats - the top 1000 Ethereum richlist (@WhaleStats) December 16, 2021
Transaction: https://t.co/YZiyKYpixK#DogeArmy Is it #Tesla ? pic.twitter.com/of4JEhSTFh
The unusually large transaction was made right before Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that his company was accepting Dogecoin. After the announcement, the coin's price spiked by 30% but then retraced back to 19%.
Dogecoin community members assumed that there should be a correlation between the two events due to the rarity of such large transactions on the Dogecoin blockchain. Additionally, the recipient wallet was created with the goal of receiving the funds and has not moved them since.
Insider trading theory
Some users have also assumed that someone at Tesla or close to the matter knew about the potential announcement and bought coins prior to Musk's post to receive a significant profit from the deal.
But such a theory does not hold water since the purchased coins have not been moved from the address; hence, they could not have been realized on the market. At press time, Dogecoin is up 13% from the announcement date. If the large transaction was part of insider trading, they would have been realized "at the top" of the rumor. In that case, the USD value of an investment would have been up 30%.
Denys Serhiichuk
Valeria Blokhina