For weeks, the German government has been selling lots of of hundreds of thousands of dollars price of Bitcoins – and this is a significant factor behind the huge sell-off of the cryptocurrency.
Last month, the German government began selling bitcoins from a wallet owned by the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
The BKA 900 Bitcoins sold in June — valued at about $52 million as of Monday — from an enormous haul seized from a now-defunct movie piracy website, based on on-chain data tracked by blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.
Last week, the federal government one other 3,000 Bitcoins sold price around 172 million dollars. On Monday one other 2,739 Bitcoins soldor cryptocurrency price $155 million.
The government has placed its crypto reserves on exchanges akin to CoinbaseBitstamp and Kraken.
When asked by CNBC on Monday, the German government was not immediately available for comment.
Bitcoin price response
In parallel with these sales, the Bitcoin price experienced a dramatic decline. According to CoinGecko data, Bitcoin sank below $55,000 on Friday, reaching its lowest level since February 2024.
At one point within the day, your complete crypto market had lost greater than $170 billion in market capitalization inside 24 hours, based on CoinGecko data.
The Bitcoin sales in Germany will not be the one concern for crypto investors. The cryptocurrency can also be under pressure since the collapsed Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which went bankrupt in 2014, needed to pay out billions of dollars price of digital currencies to its creditors.
On Friday, the trustee of the Mt. Gox bankruptcy estate, Nobuaki Kobayashi, said the corporate had begun making repayments in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to a few of its creditors through quite a few specific crypto exchanges.
Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars is a whole lot of money. But it's only a drop within the bucket whenever you consider the full issuance of Bitcoin tokens.
According to data from CoinGecko, there are currently around 19.7 million Bitcoins in circulation, price $1.1 trillion.
What matters to investors, nevertheless, is the impact these sales have on market sentiment.
James Butterfill, head of research at crypto asset manager CoinShares, told CNBC that although the Bitcoin sales were “relatively minor,” that they had “impacted market sentiment.”
Nevertheless, the Bitcoin price has risen by a very good 89 percent within the last 12 months.
Why Germany owns $2 billion price of Bitcoins
In January 2024, police within the eastern German state of Saxony announced the seizure of nearly 50,000 bitcoins, which on the time were price around $2.2 billion.
The Saxon police described the find as “the most extensive seizure of Bitcoins by law enforcement authorities in the Federal Republic of Germany to date.”
The funds were seized from the operators of Movie2k.to, a movie piracy website energetic in 2013, and transferred to a crypto wallet of the Federal Criminal Police Office.
According to Arkham Intelligence, which tracks the movements of the German government's Bitcoin wallets, the tokens began transferring as early as 2013, once they were first seized.
The German BKA currently holds around 32,488 Bitcoins. At the present exchange rate, the federal government's holdings are price around $1.9 billion.
However, not everyone seems to be joyful with Germany’s decision to sell its Bitcoin holdings.
Joana Cotar, a member of the German Bundestag, argued in a post on X last month that the federal government shouldn’t sell its bitcoins but hold them as a “strategic reserve currency.”
Cotar said she had written to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Finance Minister Christian Lindner and Saxony's Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, telling them that selling bitcoins was “not only not sensible, but counterproductive.”
She said she had invited the German officials to a lecture with Samson Mow, a distinguished Bitcoin influencer, on October 17 on the Paul Löbe House in Berlin.
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