According to a US court document, the FBI sold some of the confiscated cryptocurrencies earlier this month and managed to generate more than USD 215 million or the equivalent of IDR 3.2 trillion (assuming an exchange rate of IDR 14,995 per US dollar).
The confiscated crypto in question comes from the Silk Road marketplace. Hacker James Zhong confessed to stealing it, and then police took it in a historic seizure in November 2022. They are now selling it and they still have 41,490 Bitcoins ($1.1 billion) or equivalent to Rp.16.4 billion to get rid of, the documents say.
“In relation to the 51,351.89785803 Bitcoins lost in the Ulbricht case before Judge Schofield, the Government has begun to liquidate (sell) it,” the document states, quoted by Yahoo Finance, Tuesday (4/4/2023).
The Ulbricht case refers to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 in a high-profile case. Ulbricht ran the online black market Silk Road which was used to mostly buy and sell illegal drugs before authorities shut it down in 2014.
The US authorities plan to get rid of the remaining Bitcoins throughout 2023 in four different batches. It is not yet known exactly what kind of effect this might have on the prices of the largest digital assets in the midst of a brutal bear market.
The largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin was recently trading at USD 27,500 or the equivalent of IDR 410.3 million (assuming an exchange rate of IDR 14,920 per US dollar), down more than 2 percent from 24 hours.
Despite that, Bitcoin has remained firmly within the range it has held for the last two weeks, trading as low as around USD 27,200 or equivalent to IDR 405.8 million and as high as USD 28,400 or IDR 423.7 million.
Overall, BTC is up nearly 70 percent for the year after an encouraging first quarter in which investors grew increasingly optimistic about inflation and other macroeconomic issues. However, the price of BTC has not managed to rise above USD 29,000 for more than a few minutes in recent weeks as investors weigh in on banking failures and new inconclusive economic indicators.
Edward Moya, senior market analyst at foreign exchange market maker Oanda, said Bitcoin needed a bullish catalyst to break above the $30,000 level. “But until some significant use case arguments are made, price may only consolidate around the mid-USD 20,000 or equivalent to IDR 298.4 million,” said Moya, quoted from CoinDesk, Tuesday (4/4/2023).
Ethereum (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency, also fell 0.2 percent on Monday to hover around $1,787. Overall, the price of ETH jumped 48 percent in the first quarter of 2023. Among other altcoins, the meme-based dogecoin, long-backed Dogecoin by Twitter CEO Elon Musk jumped about 20 percent after the social media platform changed its logo to the dogecoin symbol of the common blue bird.
