- The US government sold more than 9,000 Bitcoins seized in the fraud last June.
- Bitcoin remained stable around $66,000 over the past 24 hours.
The US government caught the cryptocurrency market’s attention on April 2 with its on-chain moves.
Seized Bitcoins move
A wallet controlled by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) was seen transferring 30,17,000 Bitcoins, worth almost $2 billion at the time of writing, to an unknown wallet, according to Spot on chain.
From this intermediate address, approximately 2,000 BTCs, worth $132 million, were sent to a Coinbase Prime address, and approximately 29.8k BTC, worth $1.95 billion, to another address reportedly also owned by the U.S. government.
Interestingly, the wallet from which this money was sent contained Bitcoins that had been seized as part of the crackdown on the infamous Silk Road Hack of November 2021.
For the curious, Silk Road was an online black market that exploited Bitcoin’s anonymity to transact and hide users’ identities.
While the operator was arrested in 2013, the darknet gained widespread attention in 2021 when James Zhong, the person who stole more than 50,000 Bitcoins from the market, was arrested by US authorities.
It remains to this day one of the largest cryptocurrency seizures in history.
It is striking that in June last year the US government sold more than 9,000 Bitcoins that had been seized in the fraud. Sales at the time were approximately $206 million.
According to CryptoQuantthe US government still held nearly 209,000 seized Bitcoins, worth $14 billion.
What could be the reason?
Speculation and discussion about the latest movement ran high. To that extent, a prominent crypto influencer calculated DOJ moved Bitcoins to Coinbase for safekeeping.
Read Bitcoin’s [BTC] Price forecast 2024-25
However, there was an element of fear as many participants feared a dump was coming.
That said, the fear did not translate into increased selling pressure in the market as Bitcoin remained stable over the past 24 hours, according to AMBCrypto’s analysis. CoinMarketCap facts.