Rumors circulated on Wednesday that The US Government Sold 9.8 Thousand Bitcoin worth just over $270 million dollars, Leading to a sharp 5% drawdown in bitcoins price, and spooking investors, as expected.
Fortunately, the market seems to have absorbed this massive sale pretty well, as you can see, investors instantly went on a buying spree under 27k to create a huge bullish wick in the hourly candlestick.
What’s more interesting here though is when we checked The US government’s on-chain balance of Bitcoin, it doesn’t seem to have moved at all.
In our confusion, we looked further into this to figure out if the charts were wrong or if the speculators were wrong.
We were able to Find the Wallet that made the sale 3HpyXdQp8HnZf8YQxmWQsG4qD9miAkgDTH
9.8k Bitcoin moved into the wallet on 04/14/2023 and moved out just a month later on 05/11/20223 at a loss. The Rumors that it was a wallet controlled by the US Gov were in fact just that, Rumors. Funny enough whoever acquired this Bitcoin sure had bad timing though.
The US Government Owns Bitcoin?
You may be asking, ‘The US Gov owns Bitcoin?’ so don’t worry we won’t leave you hanging.
Yes the US does in fact own just over 200k Bitcoins that it has seized over time from criminal activity.
- Nov 2020 – Silk Road – Individual X – 69,369 BTC
- Jan 2022 – Bitfinex Hack – Lichtenstein & Morgan – 94,643 BTC
- Mar 2020 – Silk Road – James Zhong – 51,326 BTC
While it’s good that criminals had their Bitcoin seized, it may be mildly concerning that the US government currently controls such a significant portion of the supply, for context there are only 4 wallets that hold over 100,000 Bitcoin.
The reason for this concern is that the market would likely have some trouble absorbing the supply shock, were the Government to sell a lot of its Bitcoin in a short period of time. Luckily this is a very unlikely scenario.
We’ll keep you updated on future developments of the US Govs Bitcoin Holdings.