Germany and the US are selling confiscated bitcoins. How many more coins do they have

In June, German authorities transferred thousands of confiscated bitcoins to exchanges

Experts record an increased number of transfers of cryptocurrency by governments to exchanges

In the past few weeks, the German and US governments have stepped up transfers of cryptocurrency from wallets, analytics platform Arkham reported. The transactions, amounting to millions of dollars, mostly consist of confiscated bitcoins. Market participants interpret these actions as governments' intentions to sell assets on cryptocurrency exchanges.

According to Arkham, the German government transferred another 400 BTC (more than $25 million) to Bitstamp, Coinbase and Kraken exchanges. In total, 2.7 thousand BTC (approximately $170 million) were transferred from the wallet to the exchanges over the past two weeks.

On June 19, 7.5 thousand BTC left the wallet of the German government, 200 of them - on the Coinbase exchange. The funds were allegedly confiscated from the creators of the pirate site Movie2k in January. Another 200 BTC were sent to Coinbase and Kraken on June 25. About 44 thousand bitcoins worth $2.7 billion still remain on the wallet.

At the same time, 3,375 ETH ($11.7 million) were transferred from the U.S. government-controlled wallet to a new address. According to the markup, the wallet contains assets confiscated from the founders of cloud mining platform HashFlare and digital bank Polybius Bank, Sergey Potapenko and Ivan Turogin. On June 28, 11.84 bitcoins ($726 thousand) were transferred from the same wallet.

According to Arkham, there is more than $13 billion in confiscated crypto-assets in bitcoins and various stablecoins (from USDT to DAI), as well as in ETH and other tokens on the US-controlled wallets. On June 26, $240 million worth of confiscated bitcoins were transferred from a U.S. government wallet to the Coinbase exchange.

The last three months have also seen an increase in the activity of so-called dormant wallets, which have not made transactions for a long time. From April to June 2024, experts recorded large transfers to exchanges.

On June 27, the wallet, whose owner had independently mined 50 BTC 14 years ago, "woke up". The user sent these bitcoins to the exchange Binance. Another large holder, who stored 1 thousand BTC (about $61 million at current exchange rates) for six years, transferred his assets to the U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase.

In mid-June, the leading U.S. mining company Marathon Digital sold 5 thousand BTC ($330 million) of its reserves, which is 8% of their total volume.

On July 1, an investor who participated in the initial coin offering (ICO) of the Ethereum platform in 2015 and received 254,900 ETH (price at the time of the ICO $0.31) transferred 7 thousand ETH ($24.28 million) to the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange. Currently, this user owns 40 thousand Ethereum coins worth $139.5 million.