An ‘epic satoshi’, or sat #1,968,750,000,000,000, has been sold for 33.3 BTC, currently worth $2,132,180, on the auction hosted by CoinEx, the sister crypto exchange of mining pool ViaBTC.
An epic sat is the first satoshi (one hundred millionth of a single BTC) in a halving block, as per the Ordinals numbering scheme. As there have been four bitcoin halvings to date, there are only four epic satoshis in existence.
ViaBTC mined the bitcoin block 840,000 at 00:09 UTC on April 20, marking the start of the fourth epoch where each block’s subsidy is halved from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.
On April 23, ViaBTC announced they would be auctioning off the ‘epic sat’ with a starting bid of 1 BTC in a 48-hour auction.
As previously reported by TheMinerMag, in addition to the 3.125 BTC subsidy, ViaBTC bagged 37.6 BTC from transaction fees, thanks to increased on-chain activity linked to the Rune protocol.
The mining pool ‘isolated’ the rewards citing internal risk alerts triggered by an abnormal amount of accumulated fees, but then announced that it redistributed the earnings to the relevant BTC miners on the following day.