The US government now owns $4 billion worth of Bitcoin, more than quadrupling Tesla’s holdings. The US government has been auctioning Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies as a side business. It had discarded a significant amount of the Bitcoin it had obtained through seizures.
US government now own $4 billion in Bitcoin
The US government has been selling Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies at auction for years. Despite this, according to information provided by co-founders Negentropic of on-chain analytics platform Glassnode, the government still has $4.08 billion in Bitcoin as of February 2022, despite having dumped a major chunk of the Bitcoin it had obtained through seizures.
Surprisingly, with $2.01 billion and $1.86 billion, respectively, the US government owns more than twice as much as both Ukraine and Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA). Tesla purchased Bitcoin last year and listed it on its balance sheets, however, it soon stopped taking Bitcoin as payment.
After the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ($27.93 billion) and MicroStrategy ($5.43 billion), the US government ranks third in terms of Bitcoin ownership. In 2021, the value of cryptocurrency seized by US authorities surpassed $1 billion, an increase of eightfold over the previous year.
“We had around $700,000 worth of crypto seizures in fiscal year 2019,” said Jarod Koopman, director of the Internal Revenue Service’s cybercrime unit, in December. It had risen to $137 million by 2020. And we’ve already spent $1.2 billion in 2021 (as of August).”
As of December, the US Marshals Service, which is in charge of auctioning off the government’s cryptocurrency holdings, had seized and auctioned off about 185,000 Bitcoins worth an estimated $8.6 billion. According to analysts, the US government’s crypto wallet will continue to grow as long as cybercrime continues to increase at its current rate.
The Finbold noted on February 1 that Bitcoin worth more than $3.5 billion from the 2016 Bitfinex theft was ‘on the move,’ according to the Finbold. On the 31st of January, on-chain watchers began to notice unusual behavior around the wallets that held the cash from the infamous hack.
Many people found it strange that the funds were gathered without any kind of privacy-preserving steps, such as mixing them with Monero or Tornado Cash. Following that, on February 8, the US Justice Department (DOJ) reported that the hacked BTC, now worth $3.6 billion, had been recovered in the department’s largest financial bust ever.
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