US Government Moves 9,261 Bitcoin (BTC) Worth $770M to Coinbase Prime

Unknown Wallets Surface in Government Flows

The United States government moved close to 3% of its own Bitcoin (BTC) stockpile in two days, sending 9,261 BTC worth about $770 million into its Coinbase Prime deposit address across Tuesday, Oct. 6, and Wednesday, Oct. 7, on-chain tracking by Galaxy Research shows. Nearly half of that sum traces back to coins recovered from the 2016 Bitfinex hack, and other portions relate to assets forfeited in the Binance case. The genuinely new discovery is a smaller batch with a heavier implication: 2,456 BTC arrived from wallets that had never before been connected to Washington. Because those coins landed in the same address the government uses for its confirmed holdings, they are presumed to be federal forfeiture, an attribution Galaxy Research posted on X that independent verification has not yet backed. The flow escalated quickly: Tuesday opened with only $71 million in transfers before a further 8,428 BTC on Oct. 7 pushed the two-day total to roughly $770 million. That gap leaves open the possibility of further uncounted positions, a question the research note itself raised. Most of the moved coins originate from known criminal-asset seizures, but the unlabeled deposits show the government's on-chain footprint is still not fully mapped. For a federal book that already holds billions of dollars in crypto, coins that cannot be tied to a specific court case sit outside the usual accounting of seized assets. In crypto whale terms, a single holder moving 9,261 coins across 48 hours ranks among the largest transfers any monitoring desk tracks, and the federal Bitcoin holdings have become a structural factor in how much supply actually circulates. The Bitcoin (BTC) price has barely reacted to the news, sitting near $82,581, down 0.7% over the past 24 hours and close to where it stood when the flows were first reported.

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The Deposit Address and the 71%

Wednesday's tranche also earned a place in the record books. Galaxy Research reviewed 6,134 transactions on federal wallets going back to 2013 and found the government has received 555,260 Bitcoin (BTC) while sending out 236,173, excluding moves between its own addresses. Measured against that history, Wednesday ranked as the ninth-largest single-day outflow from government wallets since 2013 and the largest since Dec. 2, 2024. The receiving address itself carries a history. Since December 2025 it has taken in 11,567 BTC: 6,406 from wallets confirmed as government-controlled and about 5,160 from senders carrying no label. Both flows follow a similar deposit process, and related activity extends back to April. Coinbase provides institutional custody and trading services for the US Marshals Service, a role that has largely replaced the public auctions used between 2013 and 2015 to dispose of Silk Road coins. Depositing coins there therefore does not guarantee a sale, and the final destination of this batch is still unknown. Under the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve executive order signed by President Donald Trump, coins the government seizes are never meant to be sold. The wider stockpile tells a story of concentration. Federal holdings stand at 319,086 Bitcoin (BTC), down from the 352,587 peak recorded on Aug. 13, 2024. By case, 71% of that balance consists of assets whose final ownership is still undecided: 94,643 BTC tied to the Bitfinex hack and 127,271 BTC linked to the Lubian mining operation, which became the target of a Justice Department civil forfeiture suit in October 2025. A federal court approved returning the Bitfinex coins in January 2025, yet the main wallets had not moved as of the latest research. If the court-ordered return proceeds, roughly 30% of the federal stockpile could leave government control, a shift that would dwarf the coins moved this week.

The move has not unsettled positioning. Our live monitoring puts the market near $82,581, down 0.7% in 24 hours, with the perpetual funding rate at a calm 0.0037% and open interest near $16.2 billion. Our support and resistance scores place the nearest strong floor at $80,859, scored 92 out of 100, with the closest resistance at $84,081 scored 81. A break of either band, not this custody flow, would be the trigger worth watching. For now the market reads the transfer as housekeeping under the reserve policy rather than as supply coming to market, and 71% of the 319,086-coin federal stockpile still sits in the two unresolved cases, far from anything that could hit the order book.