TETHER SIGNED FOR ITS 96,932 BITCOIN ON OCTOBER 22 — EVERY COIN WENT BACK TO THE SAME ADDRESS — ITS FIVE PUBLIC KEYS HAVE BEEN ON THE CHAIN SINCE 2022

On October 22, 2026, at 21:34 UTC, block 972,661 carried a transaction from the address that Arkham and Nansen label as Tether's bitcoin reserve. It was that address's first spend since July 13, 2026. It was also the first spend by any of the five big reused cold wallets we've tracked since Justin Drake's October 7 post told large holders to move to addresses that have never signed.

Here's what it did. It gathered 11 outputs: one of 96,932.40541064 bitcoin and ten small ones, seven of them 600 sats or less. Three of its five keys signed. All of it, 96,932.40686258 bitcoin, went back to the same address in two outputs, less a fee of 3,432 sats.

That address first spent on September 30, 2022. Its script, with all five public keys, has been readable on the chain ever since. So this signing didn't expose anything new. It didn't fix anything either. Three keyholders signed, and the coins still went back to the old address. We found no statement from Tether on why.

The other four, labeled Binance (two addresses), Robinhood and Bitfinex, haven't spent a coin since block 970,349, mined just before Drake posted. They hold 696,799.17 bitcoin. With Tether's, that's 793,731.57 bitcoin behind keys already on the chain. Moving to a fresh address is one transaction, and anyone with a block explorer can watch for it. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $81,478.