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The US District Court for the Northern District of California has signed off on the US government’s liquidation of 69,370 bitcoins (BTC) seized from “Individual X” connected to Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road. That judicial ruling denies Battle Born Investments Company’s bid to block the sale.
However, the timing of the news caused widespread confusion within the crypto community. In actual fact, the ruling occurred last month: on December 30, 2024 and was made public that same day on the electronic, nationwide, Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system.
However, the ruling didn’t mean the government actually sold that BTC. The newsworthy occurrence was simply that one judge had granted permission. Actual sale of seized proceeds of crime by US law enforcement requires additional, administrative steps.
The US government’s wallet still contains those 69,370 BTC. Easily verifiable on-chain, it’s clear that law enforcement officers haven’t sold those coins.
Some observers speculated that the Justice Department (DoJ) could sell the BTC before the presidential inauguration on January 20. However, that doesn’t mean that the sale of the Silk Road BTC will happen imminently.
The DoJ, which holds the seized BTC, still has administrative procedures to follow before transferring or selling the coins.
The headline that triggered the news cycle about the coins was a post by DB News that earned 4.8 million views on X. Published at 9:08pm New York time, the post summarized information from an earlier article by Decrypt and elsewhere that coincided with the price of BTC dropping from $94,900 at 9:06pm to $93,439 by 9:12pm.
That was a 1.5% crash and $27 billion loss of market capitalization within six minutes.
Read more: Supreme Court won’t stop sale of 69,370 Silk Road bitcoins
The bitcoin from Silk Road’s ‘Individual X’
The BTC in question, which is worth more than $6 billion, arrived in US custody after the FBI and DoJ seized assets from someone listed in court documents as “Individual X.” Individual X allegedly stole the BTC from Silk Road.
The plaintiff in this case that had paused the liquidation of these assets, Battle Born Investments Company, was pursuing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to reveal this individual’s name.
Battle Born Investments Company claims ownership of the BTC. It claims it acquired the 69,370 coins from a bankruptcy estate associated with Raymond Ngan, whom it suspects is Individual X.
The government denied Battle Born Investments Company’s FOIA request, making it impossible for it to publicly confirm its suspicions about Ngan.
The US government has periodically sold BTC related to other Silk Road cases. Indeed, it moved 2,000 coins to a Coinbase wallet in March 2024, a few months before the US Marshals Service confirmed that Coinbase would provide custody service for the BTC in its coffers.
US Marshals also sold a separate 9,861.17 BTC in March 2023.