German authorities efficiently seized 50,000 Bitcoins (price $2.17 billion) from a pirated web site in mid-January, Saxony state police introduced on January 30.

This seizure is expounded to an ongoing investigation into alleged unauthorized business exploitation of copyrighted works below the Copyright Act and subsequent business cash laundering. The Federal Legal Police Workplace (BKA), the FBI and a personal IT firm in Munich are cooperating within the investigation.

Two unnamed suspects have been recognized, together with a 40-year-old German man and a 37-year-old Polish man, authorities stated. One in every of them voluntarily transferred the flagship digital asset to the deal with supplied by BKA.

In the meantime, that is the most important asset seizure by German police, and authorities have but to determine how the seized bitcoins will likely be used.

Notably, this isn’t the primary time German authorities have seized Bitcoin. In 2022, they seized roughly €23 million price of prime digital belongings after dismantling the server infrastructure of unlawful darknet market Hydra.

Equally, the US authorities has launched a large-scale seizure of prime cryptocurrencies. 50,000 BTC (price $3.6 billion) linked to the defunct darknet market Silk Street was lately seized from James Zong.

The US can also be actively promoting its BTC holdings. On January twenty fifth, the federal government introduced plans to promote $130 million in cryptocurrencies.

Regardless of this gross sales exercise, the US authorities nonetheless holds over 216,000 items of BTC, price $9.56 billion on the time of writing, in response to information from the Arkham Intelligence Platform.