Bitcoin Falls After U.S. Sends $240M Worth of Silk Road-Related BTC to Coinbase
About 4k bitcoin had been seized from narcotics trafficker Banmeet Singh at his January 2024 trial.
Jun 26, 2024 at 5:40 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/U33FY5VITZHIFLRIYKIOV722PM.jpg)
Bitcoin (BTC) fell back towards $60,000 on Wednesday, after a wallet tagged to the U.S. Government moved about $240 million worth of seized BTC to a Coinbase Prime address, igniting concerns among traders that the digital assets will likely to be sold.
Some 3,940 bitcoin originally seized from a Silk Road vendor was moved by the the wallet, according to an Arkham Intelligence social media post. "This BTC was originally seized from narcotics trafficker Banmeet Singh, and forfeited at trial in January 2024," the post said.
The last movement by the government— which in late 2022 seized roughly 50,000 bitcoin related to the Silk Road website—was $2 billion worth of bitcoin on April 2, which at the time also put pressure on digital markets. The last confirmed sale by the government was in March 2023, when it unloaded 9,861 coins for $216 million.
Attempting a modest bounce from its Mt. Gox-related tumble earlier this week, bitcoin slipped back below $61,000 as the news hit. It's since edged back to $61,100 down 1% over the past 24 hours, with the broader CoinDesk 20 Index lower by about the same amount. Ether {{EHT}} also slipped on the news, falling 1.6% on the day.
:format(webp)/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/coindesk/83b3bbdb-5508-48a9-a9d9-2d7dd460fd5b.png)
Aoyon Ashraf is managing editor with more than a decade of experience in covering equity markets