About 49,000 units of Bitcoin (BTC), which are currently valued at over $1 billion in US dollars, were transferred from various wallets associated with U.S. Government law enforcement seizures to new addresses on March 8, according to data from on-chain research companies.
While the prominent on-chain and financial metrics provider, Glassnode, claims that most of the transactions appear to be internal, the massive move has fuelled speculation that the government may be trying to unload its assets while the bitcoin market is at local highs.
Approximately 40k $BTC from wallets associated with US Government law enforcement seizures are on the move.
Of these, the majority appear to be internal transfers (so far), however approximately 9,861 $BTC seized from the Silk Road hacker have been sent to our Coinbase cluster. pic.twitter.com/afuEYcV18L
— glassnode (@glassnode) March 7, 2023
Internal transfers are common practices that involve transferring assets within an entity rather than selling them on cryptocurrency exchanges. It appears that the transfers in this instance are a routine aspect of the government’s handling of its crypto assets.
US government-linked addresses sent Some Bitcoin (BTC) to Coinbase
Data shared by on-chain analyst firm PackShield also shows that there were three transfers made from the wallets of U.S. law enforcement departments. These wallets had roughly 51,000 BTC confiscated from the Silk Road marketplace by US authorities in November 2021.
The FBI shut down the Silk Road, a well-known online criminal market, in 2013. Silk Road was used by several drug traffickers and other illegal vendors to deliver vast quantities of illegal drugs and other criminal goods and services to many buyers and to launder all funds flowing through it from about 2011 to 2013.
While the majority of these transfers by the US government appear to be internal, 9,861 bitcoin were allegedly transferred to the Coinbase exchange. The other two transfers are for 30,000 BTC to an address beginning with “bc1q” and 9,000 BTC to an address starting with “bc1qe7.”
#PeckShieldAlert 49k $BTC (worth $1 Billion) from wallets related to US Government law enforcement seizures have been transferred to #Coinbase (~9.8k $BTC, worth $217M), bc1qf2…fsv (30k $BTC) & bc1qe7…rdg (9k $BTC) #SilkRoad pic.twitter.com/4MzlvDzkut
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 8, 2023
The transfer of billions of dollars worth of bitcoin from U.S. law enforcement agency-linked wallets sparked wild reactions on Twitter. It is unknown why the confiscated bitcoins have suddenly been transferred to Coinbase after being sold at auction in 2014.
The “elites” are doing everything in their power to drive down the price of Bitcoin (BTC), a user pointed out, while others claim the government is trying to dump on investors. As of the time of this writing, the Justice Department had not released any public statements regarding the substantial transfer of bitcoin.
