Some believe that Dr. Craig Wright has begun moving coins out of Tulip Trust III—a fund that allegedly holds $10 billion worth of currency. Why do they think this? Because on January 15, @Whale_alerts, a Twitter account that tracks large crypto transactions to and from exchanges, reported a bitcoin transaction valued at over $1 billion to a never-before-used cryptocurrency address. Some thought that Dr. Wright was behind this transaction and that it may have been the first of many transactions stemming from the Tulip Trust III.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 123,447 #BTC (1,097,343,503 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 15, 2020
Twitter users quickly started speculating on the sender and recipient of this transaction in the comments section of the tweet, many of them believing Dr. Wright and the Tulip Trust III were behind the Bitcoin transaction.
https://twitter.com/Dean70542332/status/1217587640221831168?s=20
https://twitter.com/Wavyslime/status/1217583385851371527?s=20
That's s Craig ? 😁
— Henry Nugraha (@john_paimo) January 16, 2020
But, the rumors were quickly extinguished
However, according to Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino, Dr. Wright was not behind the transaction–Bitfinex was.
It's a 1.5k BTC refill of hot wallet and resulting change address movement.@whale_alert anyway this can be improved 😉
— Paolo Ardoino 🍐 (@paoloardoino) January 15, 2020
According to Ardoino, Bitfinex was refilling their hot wallet, and 123,000 BTC was sent, and received, at their change address.
So how did the rumors begin?
The rumor that the transaction came from the Tulip Trust III began when a fake tweet from whale_alerts claiming that Dr. Wright had moved 1 billion BTC, equivalent to $8.71496 billion, from a cryptocurrency wallet to the Huobi Exchange, began circulating on Telegram.
After that, the rest was history. Rumors began to spread like wildfire, and Twitter accounts continued to spread the image around the web.
— Marty ᵍᵐ (@martynftss) January 16, 2020
Adding fuel to these flames is the fact that this fake image was produced just seven days after the Tulip Trust III, a fund that allegedly holds $10 billion, was revealed to the public for the very first time.
New: Craig Wright just so happened to have a third "Tulip Trust" set up to hold that missing $10 billion fund.
He sent the info about the "Tulip Trust III" in a document dump of 428 dossiers.
Can someone involves in this mess pls send me $1 million to keep going? pic.twitter.com/zAcI9Wohn9
— Brendan Jay $Sullivan (@MrBrendanJay) January 9, 2020
On top of that, a court recently published a document saying that Dr. Wright notified the court that “a third party has provided the necessary information and key slice to unlock the encrypted file, and Dr. Wright has produced a list of his bitcoin holdings.” With that in mind, several people assumed the recent transaction came from Dr. Craig Wright, given what they know about the Tulip Trust III and the current status of Dr. Wright’s legal battle.
So what really happened
At the end of the day, what happened was, Bitfinex refilled their hot wallet and sent funds to a change address. That is why, from an observers perspective, a large amount of money moved to a never-before-used cryptocurrency wallet. Although Dr. Wright probably finds the rumors, as well as the fact that the public continues to speculate on him and the Tulip Trust III flattering, they are going to have to wait until a later date to see what happens with the funds in the Tulip Trust III.
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