Later on Tuesday morning, 30,175 bitcoins were reportedly transferred from a wallet purportedly owned by the US government to a Coinbase wallet.
Roughly $2 billion worth of bitcoin (BTC) would be in circulation at the current price of about $65,000.
The authorities, which had seized almost 50,000 bitcoins connected to the Silk Road website in late 2022, last verifiedlysold 9,861 coins for $216 million in March 2023.
Bitcoins were moved this morning to an unknown wallet, but Arkham Intelligence has identified the wallet as being associated with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
Following the announcement, bitcoin, which was already significantly lower on the day, fell even more, closing below $65,000. After that, it slightly recovered and is currently trading at $65,200, down 4.7% from the previous day. The same amount is deducted from the larger CoinDesk 20 Index.