Reddit may have unmasked the top dogs.
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts on the site believe that Robinhood – last month’s GameStop stock frenzy investment app – has a digital wallet full of nearly $ 2 billion in dogecoin.
The account – which controls about 29 percent of all dogecoins currently in circulation – came to the fore this week after Tesla boss Elon Musk expressed concern about the “focus” on meme-inspired cryptocurrency ownership.
A user named “AndreiFromAlberta” claimed to have solved the mystery in a long post on Reddit’s dogecoin-focused message board.
The wallet in question was created in February 2019 – about seven months after Robinhood began offering dogecoin transactions – and received large amounts of dogecoin from other accounts that appear related to Robinhood, according to the station.
“Robinhood almost certainly belongs to him,” Tom Robinson, co-founder and scientist for the blockchain data firm Elliptic, which reported speculation on Wednesday, told Bloomberg News. “The moments of its creation and the creation of the addresses from which it received funds coincide with the moments when Robinhood supports Dogecoin.”
Musk himself seems to support the theory. In response to a tweet on Tuesday stating that Robinhood could be the owner of the wallet, he said, “Seems to be.”
Account holdings exploded in value as the price of the dogecoin rose from less than a penny earlier this year to about 5 cents since Thursday, even though the digital currency was started as a joke.
If the wallet belongs to Robinhood, it is probably only used for storage purposes. The California startup says it uses its own wallets to hold the cryptocurrencies that users buy and hold through its platform.
But Robinhood declined to say whether it was the dogecoin whale.
“Like other cryptographic platforms, for reasons of operational security and to protect customer privacy, we will not confirm which addresses belong to us or not”, the company he said in a statement posted to Twitter on Wednesday.
Robinhood also said that it does not currently invest in cryptocurrency and does not use any of its clients’ cryptocurrencies for its own benefit.
A Robinhood spokesman declined to comment further.