The Dogecoin ($DOGE) community has found through an investigation of its blockchain that the wallet that at one point held around 28% of the meme-inspired cryptocurrency’s supply belongs to commission-free trading platform Robinhood.
The community’s investigation, as first spotted by Benzinga, took advantage of Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) showing off its external wallet feature by sending a specific amount of DOGE. At the time, Robinhood’s Chief Operating Officer Christine Brown revealed on Twitter the firm is working on transferring funds into external wallets and shared a screenshot showing a 420.71 DOGE transaction minus a 0.02 DOGE fee.
DOGE-dedicated Twitter account Mishaboar then used that transaction to identify both the wallet sending and receiving DOGE, which belongs to Robinhood. Looking at the history of the sender’s address, Mishaboar found a wallet address seemingly belonging to Rohinhood that received a large amount of funds from the mysterious whale account.
The DOGE whale, as CryptoGlobe reported, at one point held around 28% of the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply. When DOGE’s price started dropping, the whale saw the value of the funds within their wallet drop by over $8 billion.
According to BitInfoCharts, the whale currently golds around 4.1 billion DOGE, worth over $840 million. The whale’s DOGE holdings dramatically dropped over the last few weeks after they made a series of transactions sending the funds to different wallets.
If the whale is indeed Robinhood, then the address is simply their cold storage wallet, where user funds are kept. As Mishaboar put it, this would mean that 30% of DOGE’s supply isn’t held by one whale who can crash the market, but rather by thousands of retail investors who bet on the cryptocurrency.
DOGE’s price surged on a retail trading frenzy earlier this year that saw search interest for it explode ahead of a massive 10,000% price rally, going from an average of 135,000 monthly searches in April 2020 to 16.5 million in April 2021.
Notably, searches for DOGE have recently been dwarfing searches for other cryptocurrencies like BTC or its rival meme-inspired cryptocurrency Shiba Inu, at least in the United States. Analysis has revealed DOGE is the most searched for crypto in 23 states.
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