Supreme Court Won't Hear Case Over $4.4 Billion in Seized Silk Road Bitcoin

The United States Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a case concerning the ownership of 69,370 Bitcoin seized from the dark web marketplace Silk Road, apparently paving the way for the American government to sell the $4.38 billion stash of BTC in question.

In 2022, a federal court in California ruled against Battle Born Investments, a company that claimed it had purchased rights to the seized Bitcoin via a bankruptcy estate. Battle Born argued that the debtor from the bankruptcy action, Raymond Ngan, was the mysterious “Individual X” who had stolen billions of dollars worth of BTC from Silk Road, which the U.S. government had subsequently seized. 

The federal court was unconvinced that Ngan was really “Individual X,” and thus ruled that Battle Born did not have a valid claim to the seized Bitcoin. The following year, a federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld the ruling. 

Now that the Supreme Court has declined to hear Battle Born’s case, the issue has more or less reached the end of the road. That means that few obstacles remain to the government doing what it wishes with the seized funds—namely, selling them.

In recent months, the U.S. government has moved around massive sums of Bitcoin seized from Silk Road. During two weeks in July and August, for example, it sent some $2.6 billion worth of Bitcoin to new wallets. These moves are typically made in preparation to sell the funds. However, the U.S. Marshals Service has a custody deal with Coinbase Prime, so the exchange may have simply been holding the assets for the government.

As governments around the world continue to offload huge sums of crypto seized during enforcement actions, the dumps have triggered fears about market volatility.

The question of what the American government should do with Bitcoin seized by law enforcement has become an active one this election cycle. In July, speaking at a crypto conference in Nashville, former president Donald Trump pledged to build a “strategic Bitcoin stockpile” if re-elected. 

"I am announcing that if I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires into the future,” Trump said at the time.

Edited by Andrew Hayward