Bitcoin Whale: US Government seizes USD 1,000,000,000 of BTC from SilkRoad

A few days ago, a Bitcoin Whale Alarm of the very large variety made the rounds.

Nearly 70,000 BTC with a value of slightly more than 1 billion US dollars were moved from the fourth largest Bitcoin Wallet. This was the first transaction since April 2015. Now it was revealed who was actually behind the transaction and what the background was.
Bitcoin Whale: U.S. Justice Department

Last Thursday, the world-renowned portal Bloomberg reported on the seizure of a gigantic amount of Bitcoin by the US Department of Justice. According to it the enormous sum of 1.000.000.000 USD was seized, which came from the activities of the meanwhile closed Darknet market called Silk Road.

The US Department of Justice said

The amount seized is by far the largest amount of crypto-currency ever seized in the history of the Department.

According to the investigators, there was a cooperation with Chainalysis, a company known in the cryptospace industry. The goal of the collaboration was to identify Bitcoin transactions that were directly related to Silk Road. Obviously, this cooperation was successful and 54 transactions were discovered, which were generated by an illegal activity.
0.33% of all available BTC in the hands of the ministry

The Ministry of Justice said

The money flow was traced to a Bitcoin address. Further investigation of this address by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and other investigators revealed that the funds were linked to Silk Road. Subsequently, on November 3, 2020, law enforcement authorities confiscated several thousand Bitcoin, which had a value of over $1 billion on November 4.

In addition to this enormous amount of Bitcoin, stocks of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin SV were also confiscated. And so the U.S. Attorney David Anderson ended the statements:

The successful arrest of the Silk Road founder in 2015 left the question open where the money went. Now we have the answer. 1 billion dollars, which were gained by criminal activities, are now in the hands of the USA.

So the mystery of the mighty Bitcoin Whale is solved. But it is also interesting to note that the US government is increasingly becoming the BTC Whale. With a now seized quantity of nearly 70,000 BTC the US Department of Justice alone holds 0.33% of the available supply of Bitcoin.