- There are currently 6,394 bitcoins left in Germany that can be sold.
- The country’s government has begun selling 50,000 bitcoins taken from online movie piracy marketplace Movie2K in January.
According to data from Arkham Intelligence, the German government transferred 2,700 bitcoins to wallets linked to centralized exchanges, the B2C2 group, and an OTC service address.
On Friday, around 7:00 a.m. UTC, the German government transferred 500 BTC ($28.63 million) to the wallet address “bc1qu…guzr4”, believed to be an institutional deposit address for OTC services. This was quickly followed by transfers to the centralized exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, and Bitstamp, each with 400 BTC. The German authorities also delivered 1,000 BTC to a wallet address identified by Arkham as belonging to the B2C2 Group.
According to data from Arkham Intelligence, in the twelve hours before Friday morning, Bitstamp, Coinbase, and Kraken returned 4,169 bitcoins to the German government. On July 11, at around 7:31 am UTC, Bitstamp returned 994 bitcoins ($57.12 million) to the German government, as well as transferring an additional 574 bitcoins at 8:46 pm and two more bitcoins during the evening, totaling more than 1,627 bitcoins.
According to Arkham data, Kraken sent 597.6 BTC from its hot wallet to German authorities around the same time as Bitstamp’s first transfer, followed by an additional 363.5 BTC from its deposits at 8:50 a.m. Coinbase delivered a first batch of 311.8 BTC to the German government at around 8:32 a.m., followed by a second batch of 451 BTC at 9:12 p.m.
Presumably, the reason the bitcoins were returned was that they were not sold in accordance with the sales agreement.
Of the 50,000 bitcoins that the German government took from the movie pirate website Movie2K, 6,384 bitcoins remained to be sold as of 7:30 a.m. UTC. The German government’s bitcoin auction was previously criticized as “repugnant” by independent member of the German Bundestag and bitcoin enthusiast Joanna Kotter.
Meanwhile, bitcoin’s value has dropped 1.73% in the last 24 hours, to $57,208, according to The Block’s bitcoin price page.
