Key takeaways:
- On Monday, U.S. government wallets transferred 3,800 bitcoins worth about $235 million and 30,007 ethers worth about $53 million to Coinbase Prime.
- Trump’s March 2025 executive order states that bitcoin in the Strategic Reserve “will not be sold.” However, Monday’s coins come from active criminal cases that are formally outside the reserve.
- No one confirmed the sale. But the contract under which Coinbase services government crypto explicitly covers asset liquidation.
- Government wallets hold 324,552 bitcoins. That’s about 1.5 percent of everything that will ever be created.
On Monday, US government wallets sent 3,800 bitcoins to the Coinbase Prime exchange. They were worth about $235 million at the time. This happened sixteen months after Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. The document states in black and white that bitcoin placed in the reserve “will not be sold.”
Today, no one can say whether Monday’s transfer breaks this promise. And this is the most interesting thing in the whole story.
Two criminal cases and wallets that were emptied after the transfer
Alex Thorn from Galaxy Research confirmed the origin of the coins. The 2,875 bitcoins come from the case of Ryan Farace, a darknet dealer known as “Xanaxman”. Another 925 are funds secured from the now defunct BTC-e exchange. Both portions first passed through fresh intermediary wallets, and these were cleared to zero immediately after the transfer.
Ether went simpler, straight to the deposit address. 30,007 ETH coins worth approximately $53 million came from the wallets of Brian Krewson, an Oracle employee from a $54 million federal laundering case.
Separately, 140 bitcoins circulated between government addresses and a Coinbase cold wallet. This is a simple internal reshuffle. That’s why some counters show about 3,940 coins instead of 3,800, and the sum sometimes comes to 288, sometimes 297 million dollars. I’ve seen this discrepancy cited as a contradiction this week. It’s not a contradiction, it’s just a matter of whether you include shuffling.
The regulation says “do not sell”. It doesn’t say what exactly
This is where it gets uncomfortable for both sides of the dispute. The regulation of March 2025 established two separate entities. A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, where bitcoin is supposed to stay forever, and a separate vault for the rest of the digital assets, where the Treasury can set its own plans. Ether from Monday falls into the second bag, so its sale ban does not apply at all.
It’s more difficult with bitcoin. The ban covers coins placed in reserve, and the regulation allows for exceptions: restitution to victims, prosecution purposes, court judgment. Farace’s coins and BTC-e are still pending in criminal proceedings. Formally, they could never have been included in the reserve.
But after sixteen months, no one still knows what exactly is in this reserve. The Treasury Department and the Commerce Department are still at odds over who will run it. I believe this is the actual scandal, not the transfer itself. The reserve, announced with fanfare, still has neither a host nor a table of contents.
A contract that few people remember
In 2024, the U.S. Marshals Service selected Coinbase Prime to handle confiscated digital assets. The contract is worth $32.5 million and runs for five years. It includes custody, advanced trading services and asset liquidation in accordance with ministry policy.
This means that the infrastructure for sale has been ready for two years. Government wallets have sent money there before, although on a different scale. In April, 2,438 bitcoins went out from a separate case. In June, approximately $984,000 was linked to FTX and Alameda. Monday’s transfer is one of the largest government moves to this platform in 2026.
It doesn’t prove sales. Coinbase Prime also does custody, financing and staking. Sometimes agencies simply consolidate their portfolios. But large resources are kept in cold wallets, not on the stock exchange. Going public usually announces something.
Will $235 million break the stock?
Government wallets hold 324,552 bitcoins, 28,394 ether and 145.5 million USDT. Total approximately $20.65 billion. Monday’s portion is 1.1 percent of that stack.
Now the other side. The daily turnover of bitcoin alone is approximately $26 billion. 235 million is less than a percent of this. Even if the government sold everything at once in one session, the market would swallow it.
The real risk lies elsewhere and is long-term. 324,552 bitcoins is about 1.5 percent of everything that will ever be created, because there will be no more than 21 million coins. This supply hangs over the exchange rate as long as its fate is determined by politics, and not by a mechanism written in code. Yesterday, bitcoin rebounded from $62,380 to around $64,700 after U.S. inflation tumbled 0.4 percent month-on-month. One macro reading moved the course more strongly than the entire confiscation.
What does this mean for you
The lesson is simple and uncomfortable for everyone who celebrated in March 2025 (including me). A sovereign bitcoin reserve is a political promise, not a guarantee. A promise lasts as long as a term of office and as long as a document that no one can enforce.
Polish readers have here a free sample of the same disease, only from the other side. When Washington cannot agree on who manages 324,000 bitcoins, after the president’s third veto, on July 1, we entered the MiCA regime without a supervisory body. The Polish Financial Supervision Authority does not accept license applications, and domestic companies have to flee to foreign jurisdictions to continue doing business in Poland… Two countries, two vacuums, the same cause: politics cannot keep up with the asset that does not wait.
Practically: don’t change your position because of this one transfer. But keep an eye on government addresses, because they publish their intentions faster than the Treasury Department. If 3,800 coins move from Coinbase Prime, you will know from the blockchain, not from the message.
