Around $33.6 million worth of cryptocurrency moved out of U.S. government wallets on Nov. 3. These addresses hold some of the funds confiscated following the 2021 collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda.
According to data from analytics firm Arkham, the funds were moved to two unidentified addresses.
Specifically, the wallet sent the first batch of 4,815 ether (ETH), worth over $17 million, to an address starting with “0x9AcA,” followed by the second batch of over 209 ETH to another address starting with “0x9cdB8.” In total, there were 5,024 ethers, currently valued at around $18 million.
The US government account also made multiple transactions that included transfers of $13.05 million worth of BUSD and $1.55 million worth of SHIB.
The government wallet movements, labeled by Arkham as “FTX Alameda Confiscated Funds,” included transactions with a variety of other tokens, including AERGO, POWR, AXS, YFI, WBTC, NMR, COMP, SRM, and RLC.
The reasons for these wallets' recent activities are still completely unknown.
There is a possibility that the transfers are to compensate persons or entities that suffered financial losses due to fraudulent activities related to entities founded by Sam Bankman-Fried.
Although, the movements could also be part of the authorities' strategy to manage the seized assets. This, taking into account that last Monday about 10,000 bitcoins equivalent to 963 million dollars were transferred to the Coinbase Prime wallet.
These transactions are generating concern in the community, as it is feared that Joe Biden's government will sell the crypto assets it has in its hands (product of confiscations) before handing over power to Donald Trump next January.
An action that, for many, would be part of a plan to “obstruct the president-elect’s plans to create a strategic bitcoin reserve.”
In this sense, it is striking that the transfers are taking place in the midst of the altcoin rally that the market is experiencing, in what is considered to be the largest altseason in history.
This is a context where veteran projects such as Ripple's XRP, Stellar (XLM), Hedera (HBAR) and Algorand (ALGO) are leading the resurgence of non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies.
Hence, the US moves have generated surprise. As many followers of the Arkham account comment, it was not known that the United States was handling so many altcoins and now their fears point to the government trying to manipulate the market.
