A hard drive thrown away, a forgotten password, a wallet file never backed up. In 2010 a coin was worth cents.
Sleeping Giants
The largest early Bitcoin addresses that have sent nothing since the network’s first years (2009 to 2011). Every coin is still there on the public blockchain, waiting.
Last verified on the blockchain: 6 November 2026 · data via mempool.space
Wake any address
Paste any Bitcoin address. We read the public blockchain live and travel back to the day it was first used.
The Satoshi addresses
Two addresses widely attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, from blocks 0 and 9. The attribution is historical, not cryptographic proof. Their balances are checked live as you read this.
The Patoshi coins
There is no single address with Satoshi’s million. It is spread across about 22,000 blocks, 50 BTC each, mined by one early miner in 2009 and 2010. Every orange light below is one of those blocks.
A constellation of old money
Each light is one address. Its position shows when the coins arrived, its size how many it holds. Tap one to open its story.
What they slept through
The value of the coins in these addresses, month by month, while no one spent them.
Every sleeping giant
Open any address to travel back to the month its coins arrived: the price then, the value now, and what was happening in Bitcoin.
Awakened giants
Every week the blockchain is checked again. If one of these addresses sends coins, it appears here.
Follow awakenings by RSSAdd the feed to any RSS reader and get a new item the week one of these addresses sends coins.
Famous awakenings
- 20 Mar2026
- 4 Jul2025
The 80,000 BTC giant of 2011
80,000 BTCOne of the largest early holders, with no outgoing transactions since 2011, moved about 80,000 BTC across several addresses in early July 2025. Weeks later the firm Galaxy confirmed it had sold more than 80,000 Satoshi-era bitcoin for a client, worth over $9 billion, one of the largest Bitcoin trades in history. Four 2011 addresses that we checked on the blockchain all sent their coins on the same day, 4 July 2025.
- 16 Aug2023
1,005 BTC mined in 2010
1,005 BTCAn old address sent 1,005 BTC after 13 years of silence. When the coins arrived in 2010 they were worth about $328. When they moved, they were worth more than $29 million.
Sources: Cointelegraph
- 20 May2020
50 BTC from February 2009
50 BTCFifty coins mined in block 3,654, one month after Bitcoin began, moved for the first time in more than 11 years. Rumours that Satoshi had returned spread for hours, and the price briefly fell. Analysts later showed the miner was very unlikely to be Satoshi.
Why do giants sleep?
Nobody can say for a single address. These are the usual reasons old coins stay still.
Some early holders have died, and their keys went with them.
Some holders simply never sell, and keep coins offline for decades on purpose.
Coins tied to old hacks are watched by everyone. Moving them would be noticed at once.
How this list is made
- Candidates are checked one by one against the public blockchain (mempool.space, with Blockstream as a backup).
- An address is listed only if its first coins arrived in 2009–2011, its full history shows no outgoing transaction after 2011, and it still holds at least 1,000 BTC. Two listed addresses sent coins in 2010 and nothing since.
- These are addresses, not people: one owner can control several of them.
- “Coins arrived” is the date of the largest deposit. “Asleep since” is the date of the address’s last outgoing transaction, or of its first incoming coins if it has never sent any. Incoming transactions after that date are possible (anyone can send small amounts to any address) and do not count as the owner moving coins; the latest one is shown for each address. Prices are the Bitcoin price on the first day of that month, from the Bitcoin Years price archive; before July 2010 there was no market price.
- This is not a full census of the blockchain: it lists every address we have verified so far, and new ones are added as they are checked.
- We never guess who owns an address. Only the two Satoshi addresses are named, and that attribution is historical, not cryptographic proof.
- The check runs again every week. If an address’s history cannot be fully read, its last verified record is kept and marked, never reclassified.
- Values in dollars use the live price.
Questions
Where is Satoshi’s 1 million bitcoin?
There is no single address holding it. The coins linked to Satoshi are spread across about 22,000 blocks mined in 2009 and 2010, with 50 BTC in each block reward, for roughly 1.1 million BTC. They were found through a pattern in the early blocks (the Patoshi pattern). We have checked every one of the 21,953 Patoshi block rewards on the blockchain ourselves: 21,922 have never been spent and 31 were spent, among them block 9, whose reward paid for the first ever Bitcoin transaction, to Hal Finney in January 2009. Last checked 2026-11-06. The link to Satoshi is widely believed but not proven.
What is a sleeping giant?
A Bitcoin address that received a large amount of bitcoin in the network’s first years (2009 to 2011) and has made no outgoing transaction since 2011. The coins are still there, visible to anyone on the public blockchain, but have not moved for well over a decade.
Are these Satoshi Nakamoto’s coins?
Only the two addresses in the Satoshi section are widely accepted as Satoshi’s: the Genesis Block address and the block 9 address used for the first transaction to Hal Finney. Researchers estimate that Satoshi also mined roughly 1.1 million BTC in about 22,000 early blocks, 50 BTC each (the Patoshi coins, shown in their own section), but that link is an estimate, not a proof. The large addresses in the main list are not attributed to anyone here.
Why would someone never move millions of dollars?
Nobody knows for any single address. Common reasons are lost keys or hardware, owners who have died, early miners who forgot their coins, long-term cold storage, and coins linked to old thefts that would be traced if they moved. We do not guess who owns any address.
How do you verify the data?
Every address is checked against the public blockchain through the mempool.space and Blockstream APIs. An address is listed only if its first coins arrived in 2009–2011, its full transaction history shows no outgoing transaction after 2011, and it still holds at least 1,000 BTC. Two listed addresses did send coins in 2010 and nothing since. One owner can control several addresses, so 13 addresses are not necessarily 13 people. The check runs again every week.
What happens if a sleeping giant wakes up?
The weekly check notices the outgoing transaction and the address moves to the Awakened section with the date it woke up. Old coins moving is often big news, because it can mean a lost fortune was found or an early holder decided to sell. You can follow them in any RSS reader with the Sleeping Giants feed.
Can I check an address myself?
Yes. Every row links to the address on mempool.space, an open-source block explorer. The blockchain is public, so anyone can verify these numbers.