Silk Road Bitcoin Worth $2B Moved by U.S. Government: On-Chain Data
The last confirmed government sale was just more than a year ago.
Apr 2, 2024 at 4:13 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/PMAPKRCDTJA3HF3Y44G6JPDV4Y.jpg)
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- A wallet tagged as belonging to the U.S. government moved 30,175 bitcoins on Tuesday.
- Some 2,000 of the bitcoin were moved to a wallet identified as being to Coinbase, with the rest to another government-tagged wallet.
A wallet tagged as belonging to the U.S. government moved 30,175 bitcoins late Tuesday morning. With bitcoin's (BTC) current price around the $65,000 level, that would be roughly $2 billion worth of the token.
The last confirmed sale by the government – which in late 2022 seized roughly 50,000 bitcoins related to the Silk Road website – was in March 2023, when it unloaded 9,861 coins for $216 million.
Some 2,000 bitcoin were moved to a wallet tagged by Arkham Intelligence as belonging to crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN). The remainder were moved to a wallet Arkham identified as belonging to the government.
Already sharply lower on the day, bitcoin slipped a bit further following the news, dipping under $65,000. It's since bounced a bit, now trading at $65,200, down 4.7% over the past 24 hours. The broader CoinDesk 20 Index is lower by the same amount.
CORRECTION (April 3, 10:17 UTC): Corrects destination of funds in third paragraph.
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Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk's managing editor for Markets. He holds BTC above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.