Approximately $2 billion worth of confiscated Bitcoin (BTC) linked to the Silk Road website was transferred to cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Prime on Monday.
A wallet tagged “U.S. Government: Silk Road Department of Justice Confiscated Funds” sent 19,800 Bitcoins on Monday to a new address with no transaction history, according to Arkham Intelligence blockchain data. The funds were then deposited into Coinbase Prime.
The transfer likely indicates that the government is preparing to sell assets, or has already sold them. Government sell-offs earlier this year have caused significant declines in Bitcoin, but today's movement has been more muted so far, with the price down just over 1% since the news broke, to its current level of 95,800. It's dollars. As a result of this move, the US government still holds $18 billion worth of seized crypto assets, according to Arkham.
In 2022, the Department of Justice announced that it had seized more than 50,000 BTC and arrested James Zhong, who the government claimed in 2012 manipulated the trading system of the dark web market Silk Road, after pleading guilty to wire fraud. .
Last month, the U.S. District Court for Northern California ordered parties to hold the digital assets and funds confiscated in connection with Silk Road pending the resolution of an ongoing FOIA lawsuit that “the government may not “It is stipulated that it is possible to liquidate.”
The last known sale of Silk Road assets by the government was in March 2023, when it sold nearly 10,000 BTC for $216 million, court filings show. The government disclosed in its filing that it planned to sell the remaining assets in four installments during the year, but there have been no further announcements about the sale since then. Earlier this year, the U.S. Marshals Service, a division of the Department of Justice, announced a partnership with Coinbase Prime to “protect and trade” the government's large digital assets.
