English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Indonesian
Russian
The U.S. authorities, a major world holder of (BTC), at present controls over 200,000 BTC, valued at round $5 billion, as per knowledge evaluation by 21.co. These holdings are securely saved offline in {hardware} wallets supervised by the Division of Justice and the Inside Income Service.
A good portion of those property have been confiscated from cyber criminals, with three latest seizures contributing roughly 215,000 BTC to the federal government’s treasury. The most important confiscations embody 69,369 BTC from Silk Highway founder Ross Ulbricht in 2020, 94,643 BTC from Bitfinex hackers Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan in January 2022, and 51,326 BTC from James Zhong in March 2022.
The U.S. Marshals Service solely takes possession of those seized property following a courtroom’s definitive forfeiture judgment. The liquidation course of for these cryptocurrencies started in January 2021 and is anticipated to be accomplished by the top of 2023.
Traditionally, the federal government has periodically auctioned off seized Bitcoin primarily based on courtroom liquidation orders. Notably, entrepreneur Tim Draper bought 30,000 BTC throughout such an public sale in 2014. Not too long ago, crypto exchanges resembling Coinbase (NASDAQ:) have been utilized for promoting seized Bitcoin.
This text was generated with the help of AI and reviewed by an editor. For extra info see our T&C.