Someone just lit $8.5 million on fire. Digitally speaking.
On May 26, an unidentified sender transferred 107 BTC to the Bitcoin burn address 1111111111111111111114oLvT2, spread across five separate transactions. With Bitcoin trading around $79,000 to $80,000 at the time, that puts the total value somewhere between $8.2M and $8.5M. The coins are now permanently unspendable, gone from circulation forever.
The burn address has a public key made entirely of zeros, which means nobody possesses (or can possess) the corresponding private key needed to move funds out. Every satoshi sent there is functionally deleted from Bitcoin’s supply.
What we know, and what we don’t
Here’s the thing: nobody knows who did this or why.
