The U.S. government currently holds over $8 billion in Bitcoin

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Bitcoin holders have a lot to be excited about in the new year: Prices are rising, spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) appear to be approved, and a record number of Bitcoins remain unchanged in a year. Yesterday was even Bitcoin’s 15th birthday.

The U.S. government should be happy, too. The Federal Reserve (Fed) currently holds at least $8.3 billion in Bitcoin as a result of the price surge, compared with $5 billion less than three months ago.

Between November 2020 and 2022, authorities disclosed that a total of 207,189 BTC had been seized in three separate operations involving the Silk Road darknet market, hacker Jimmy Zhu, and Bitfinex exchange hackers.

In February last year, officials sold 9,861 BTC that Silk Road once owned on Coinbase, and then sold less than 5%. The transactions raised $215 million at an average price of $21,800 per BTC, about half the current price.

At the time, U.S. prosecutors said they planned to sell Silk Road’s remaining bitcoins — 41,491 bitcoins worth $1 billion at the time and now worth $1.8 billion — in four tranches in 2024. This deadline expires in two months.

Number of Bitcoins sold in the United States

Only one batch may have been processed so far, with the US Department of Justice sending 8,200 BTC to Coinbase last July ($252 million then, $350 million now). But it has not yet been confirmed whether any transaction actually took place.

Counting these transactions as sales means the United States has made $640 million from seizing and selling BTC over the past decade.

During this period, the price of Bitcoin increased 70 times. If the U.S. government chooses to keep all confiscated Bitcoins rather than sell them, the Fed would still own about 400,000 Bitcoins ($17.4 billion), nearly double its current value.

The market may actually see the U.S. government dump more Silk Road-related Bitcoin in the coming months. However, there is currently no information on the timeline for the sale of BTC confiscated by Bitfinex hackers Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein and Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan.

Source: Jameson Lopp

Regardless, at least one group of researchers suggested last year that the United States may have the largest government Bitcoin repository in the world. The United States is ahead of El Salvador, Ukraine, Bhutan, Venezuela and Finland, which have a combined holdings of just 4,000 Bitcoins ($172 million).

China was not mentioned by name in the article. However, Beijing seized 195,000 BTC ($8.4 billion) in 2020 from the cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme PlusToken, as well as a number of other tokens, including ETH and XRP.

Had Beijing not sold off Bitcoin too early like the United States, the two superpowers would have been essentially evenly matched in terms of Bitcoin holdings.