Popular crypto tracking service Whale Alert has drawn public attention to a large movement of Shiba Inu tokens from the Turkish exchange BtcTurk to an unknown wallet.
Whale Alert indexed the transaction yesterday, revealing that a whopping 2,884,590,622,344 (2.88 trillion) Shiba Inu tokens were withdrawn from BtcTurk to an anonymous wallet at 4:23 p.m. (UTC).
The transaction was valued at $65.7 million at the time and caught the attention of members of the Shiba Inu community.
Shiba Inu investors react
As expected, the transaction sparked reactions from SHIB supporters, with many investors wanting to know the identity of the user and the reasons behind the transaction.
Some speculated that the transaction was initiated by a crypto whale who decided to remove his SHIB holdings from the Turkish exchange in anticipation of a possible price increase.
However, others believe the movement was for security purposes. This is because storing crypto assets in personal blockchain wallets is safer than storing them on exchanges.
BTCTurk provides clarity
Amid this debate, BtcTurk clarified that it initiated the transaction as part of its routing wallet optimization efforts. For comparison, crypto exchanges typically move their assets between wallets for several reasons, ranging from security concerns to operational efficiency.
Because these transfers occur on-chain, they mostly appear as large crypto transactions on the blockchain, with tracking services like Whale Alert indexing them to X.
Earlier this year, The Crypto Basic reported on several internal SHIB transfers related to Robinhood. These include the movement of 2.7 trillion SHIB and further reallocation…
