The US government moved $2.1 billion in Bitcoin obtained from the Silk Road case
The wallet address that owns 30,175 BTC labeled by the US Government has moved this amount of Bitcoin to a Coinbase Prime wallet for an unknown purpose.
On the night of April 2, 2024, the cryptocurrency community was "stirred" by the news that a wallet address labeled as owned by the US Government held more than 2 billion USD worth of Bitcoin (BTC). transaction actions related to this asset.
Looks like they're doing a test transaction to 3KrZVU9Jz4UKHpKUtuvkEMX1tY8zeiTvX2 which Arkham labels as Coinbase Prime Deposit.
Once this tx is confirmed I'd assume they start moving big boys. https://t.co/mejXQicJcE pic.twitter.com/EKmhIcmxbP— Steven (@Dogetoshi) April 2, 2024
According to data from on-chain platform Arkham Intelligence, the said wallet address, containing 30,175 Bitcoin, began trading with a test order moving 0.001 BTC to a wallet reported to be Coinbase Prime.
An hour later, the wallet owned by the US Government officially moved another 1,999 BTC worth $139 million to the same deposit wallet address of Coinbase Prime.
Update: 1999 BTC ($139M) transferred to the same Coinbase Prime deposit address
txn hash
b614dd2e0fa06d776ee4d45973fab5ceb6e2dfebfb84e5f7bd45ef0975455240
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) April 2, 2024
According to many sources, the above BTC is part of the 50,000 Bitcoin confiscated by US authorities from James Zhong, an individual who admitted to attacking and stealing assets from Silk Road, the notorious Internet black market. was destroyed by the US in 2013.
This is the latest move related to the wallet address holding Bitcoin from the US Government's Silk Road case, since selling 9,800 BTC for 261 million USD in March 2023. However, this action is quite contradictory to their previous plan, which was to only liquidate about 2,934 Bitcoins confiscated from the Silk Road black market with a market value at that time of 178 million USD.
A month ago, US authorities also took similar action with 15,000 BTC seized from the Bitfinex exchange attack - with the same pattern: transfer a small amount of BTC to a new wallet for testing, then all the remaining money.
Silk Road can be considered one of the 10 indelible "stains" that marked the first application of Bitcoin, but is associated with "negativity".
During its 30 months of existence, Silk Road traded 9.9 million BTC (equivalent to 500 billion USD) before being "prosecuted" by the FBI. The Silk Road incident still haunts today, when the US Department of Justice confiscated nearly 1 billion USD in BTC from the world's 4th largest Bitcoin wallet - alleging that this wallet was owned by Silk. Road.
According to statistics, the United States government still owns more than 207,000 BTC in evidence seized from crime suppression activities related to cryptocurrency over the past decade, including 94,600 BTC (more than 6 .2 billion USD) seized from the Bitfinex hack. This amount of BTC has a total value of up to 13.4 billion USD.
Currently, the final purpose of the US Government is unknown, but the above move caused Bitcoin, which had already dropped sharply today, to continue to fall further to below 65,000 USD after the news. At the time of writing, the price has recovered slightly to trade around $65,500, but is still down about 4.5% over the past 24 hours, leaving more than $200 million in crypto liquidated amid the correction. the whole market.
On the evening of November 7, 2022, the US Department of Justice announced that it had confiscated 50,076 Bitcoins hidden by James Zhong, a suspect involved in the Silk Road "black market" in 2012.
According to published information, the above amount was confiscated by US officials in November 2021, when Bitcoin reached its ATH peak. Therefore, the value of the Bitcoin warehouse at that time was more than 3.36 billion USD. The US Department of Justice confirmed that the amount of money was the largest asset seizure in history as of November 2021, but has now fallen to second place - after the confiscation of 3.6 billion USD from the hack. Bitfinex in early 2022.
Based on the current value of Bitcoin, the remaining 50,076 BTC are only worth 1.036 billion USD.
Meanwhile, James Zhong is the person accused of stealing Bitcoin from Silk Road and hiding it for more than 10 years. After a longer investigation, the police finally tracked down this person, raided Zhong's house in Georgia and successfully confiscated all the Bitcoins.
In March 2022, James Zhong decided to surrender to the authorities and pleaded guilty to attacking Silk Road during the trial on November 4, 2022. This person also surrendered another 1,104 BTC. This person is facing a sentence of up to 20 years.
It is currently unclear what the US government will do with the above 50,076 BTC. If they decide to auction these Bitcoins, it could have more or less an impact on the cryptocurrency market in general.
