Bitcoin Drops To $59,000 As US Government Moves To Sell More BTC

Bitcoin fell 2.5% on Wednesday to $59.100 after the U.S. government moved more of its Silk Road-affiliated Bitcoin holdings to Coinbase Prime.

• On-chain analysis platform Arkham Intelligence flagged the move on Wednesday, noting that 10,000 BTC worth $593 million had been moved.
• “Wallet bc1ql received 10K BTC from a known US Government wallet 2 weeks ago,” Arkham wrote to Twitter. “This BTC has just been sent on to 33J, a Coinbase Prime deposit wallet.”
• According to Arkham, the U.S. government’s Bitcoin wallet still holds 203,239 BTC, worth $12 billion.
• Much of that Bitcoin was seized from the hacker of the fallen darknet marketplace Silk Road in 2021. At the time, the 50,000 BTC seizure amounted to the largest financial seizure ever conducted by the Department of Justice.
• This record was later broken months later when the DOJ seized 94,600 BTC from Heather ‘Razzlekhan’ Morgan and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, who together hacked the Bitfinex crypto exchange.
• The movement to Coinbase implies that the government continues selling its BTC, despite Donald Trump’s promise to forever HODL the government’s current coins if elected president in November.
• It’s also coupled with ongoing BTC redistributions to Mt. Gox creditors. Arkham flagged a $2 billion Bitcoin move on Tuesday of creditor’s coins from BitGo’s blockchain wallet.