Why Reddit thinks Robinhood is the $2 billion dogecoin whale

Reddit may have unmasked the top doge.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts on the site think Robinhood — the investing app at the center of last month’s GameStop stock frenzy — is the owner of a digital wallet stuffed with nearly $2 billion in dogecoin.

The account — which controls about 29 percent of all the dogecoin currently in circulation — entered the spotlight this week after Tesla chief Elon Musk raised concerns about “concentration” in the meme-inspired cryptocurrency’s ownership.

A user called “AndreiFromAlberta” claimed to have solved the mystery in a lengthy post on Reddit’s dogecoin-focused message board.

The wallet in question was created in February 2019 — about seven months after Robinhood started offering dogecoin trades — and received large amounts of dogecoin from other accounts that appear linked to Robinhood, according to the post.

“It almost certainly belongs to Robinhood,” Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist of the blockchain data firm Elliptic, told Bloomberg News, which reported on the speculation Wednesday. “The timings of its creation, and the creation of the addresses that it received funds from, match the timings of Robinhood’s support of Dogecoin.”

Musk himself appears to support the theory. In response to a Tuesday tweet positing that Robinhood might be the wallet’s owner, he said, “Sounds like it is.”

The account’s holdings have exploded in value as the price of dogecoin surged from less than a penny at the start of the year to about 5 cents as of Thursday even though the digital coin was started as a joke.

If the wallet is Robinhood’s, it’s likely just being used for storage purposes. The California-based startup says it uses its own wallets to hold the cryptocurrencies that users buy and own through its platform.

But Robinhood refused to say whether it’s the dogecoin whale.

“Just like other crypto platforms, for operational security reasons and to protect customer privacy, we will not confirm which addresses do or do not belong to us,” the company said in a statement it posted on Twitter Wednesday.