Silk Road Bitcoin Worth $600 Million Moved to New Wallet by US Government

Key Points:

• The US government has transferred 10,000 Bitcoin from Silk Road-linked wallets to a Coinbase Prime wallet.
• This move follows a July transfer of $2 billion worth of Silk Road Bitcoin and aligns with recent trends of liquidating large cryptocurrency reserves.

The US government has just transferred 10,000 Bitcoins from wallets identified as connected to the now defunct dark web marketplace Silk Road, which is now worth nearly $594 million at transfer time.

Read more: Silk Road Bitcoin Worth More Than $2 Billion Suspected of Being Sold by the US Government

US Government Transfers 10,000 Silk Road Bitcoins

Arkham Intelligence shows that therein the process the Silk Road Bitcoin is transferred to a wallet tied to Coinbase Prime. So far there is no signal that the government will auction or retain the assets.

This latest activity follows another massive transfer that occurred a bit earlier this July, in which nearly $2 billion worth of Silk Road Bitcoin moved for unknown purposes. Such moves have been accompanied by a decline in sentiment in the cryptocurrency space.

In July, a crypto wallet associated with the U.S. Department of Justice moved $2 billion worth of seized Bitcoin to an unknown wallet. Reports indicate that the transferred Bitcoins are part of the approximately $2 billion seized from Silk Road.

The online dark market of Silk Road was infamous not just for drug trafficking but also for money laundering, and all of these were conducted using Bitcoin as the method of payment.

Doubts About US Government’s Bitcoin Liquidation

The US government holds a relatively large share of the world’s Bitcoin reserves. Many of the latter had come to light in terms of seizures in connection with criminal investigations. Its recent moves are raising eyebrows in the community, as they sound very much like those of the German government, which just liquidated 50,000 BTC of its reserves back in July after a series of sell-offs.

By late 2023, a US appeals court—one that subsequently espoused the confiscation involving about 70,000 BTC, and other forms of virtual currencies pointed to by the DOJ as having been used in the operations of the Silk Road—had in effect ruled in its favor.