Newsletter
- According to Arkham, wallets related to the U.S. government transferred 12,267 bitcoins on Thursday, worth approximately $1.01 billion; these funds came from assets confiscated in the Bitfinex hacking case and were transferred to a new, unmarked address.
- Earlier on Wednesday, the relevant wallet transferred approximately $119 million in USDT and about 2,574 Bitcoins to Coinbase Prime. Since Coinbase Prime also provides custody services, this does not necessarily confirm a sale has taken place.
- An executive order in March 2025 required that confiscated bitcoins be placed in a reserve that would not be sold. The U.S. government currently holds approximately $24.85 billion in bitcoins.
The U.S. government has just mobilized over $1 billion in Bitcoin related to one of the most notorious hacking incidents in the cryptocurrency industry.
Blockchain analytics firm Arkham identified the wallet that contained the funds confiscated in the Bitfinex hacking case and conducted a single transaction at 9:33 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, transferring 12,267 bitcoins, worth approximately $1.01 billion. Nearly all of this amount was transferred to a new, unmarked address, with an additional 0.0012 bitcoins going to a second wallet.
These coins have not been transferred to exchanges, and transfers between wallets do not necessarily imply a sale. However, the data for Arkham indeed marks both outputs as "spent," which means that these coins were subsequently transferred again.
This batch of bitcoins is part of approximately 94,000 bitcoins that were confiscated by the government in 2022. These assets came from Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather, Razzlekhan, Morgan; the former orchestrated the Bitfinex hacker attack in 2016. As reported by Decrypt in April, the government also transferred about 8.2 bitcoins from the same batch of confiscated assets to Coinbase Prime.
Prior to this transfer on Thursday, there were other similar transactions recently. According to Arkham data, on Wednesday, a wallet related to the government transferred approximately 119 million US dollars in USDT and about 2,574 bitcoins, valued at around 215 million US dollars, to Coinbase Prime. These bitcoins were transferred through an intermediate address.
In July of this year, the U.S. government also transferred confiscated crypto assets worth $288 million to Coinbase Prime. Since Coinbase Prime also provides hosting services, the transfer to that platform does not necessarily indicate a sale has taken place.
These developments have once again raised questions from the outside world about how Washington will handle its holdings of crypto assets. In March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that required confiscated bitcoins to be included in a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and not to be sold. In August of the same year, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Branson retracted his previous statement suggesting that the government would no longer increase its holdings of bitcoin, indicating that the government would explore ways to increase this reserve in a budget-neutral manner.
Prior to the issuance of this administrative order, in January 2025, a federal court cleared the way for the sale of Bitcoin worth $6.5 billion that was confiscated in the Silk Road case.
According to the data from Arkham, based on a Bitcoin price of around $81,000, the U.S. government currently holds approximately 306,795 Bitcoins, valued at about $24.85 billion.
