The US government transferred 9,261 Bitcoin worth $770 million to Coinbase Prime over the past two days, the latest in a series of onchain movements that show federal agencies continuing to recover assets from years-old exchange hacks and enforcement actions. The flows, first flagged by Galaxy Research in a Thursday X post, reinforce Coinbase Prime’s role as the designated custodian for the US Marshals Service since 2024 and keep alive the question of whether any of this supply will ever reach the open market.
The custody pipeline
Roughly half the tranche, about 4,630 Bitcoin, traces to the 2016 Bitfinex exploit, while another portion comes from previously documented Binance-related seizures. Coinbase Prime has handled these transfers since the Marshals Service named it custody provider two years ago, creating a visible pipeline from seizure wallet to institutional cold storage. The July movement of $297 million in Bitcoin and Ether followed the same pattern.
The mystery tranche
An additional 2,456 Bitcoin arrived at the government’s Coinbase Prime seizure address from previously unknown holdings, according to Galaxy. The firm said the coins “may represent new law enforcement seizures,” though no agency has confirmed the source. The opacity is standard: the government does not announce seizures in real time, and onchain analysts are left matching cluster labels to press releases after the fact.
The executive order constraint
Previous transfers have triggered speculation about imminent liquidations. That reading clashes with President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, which directed that seized Bitcoin not be sold and instead form part of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Unless the order is rescinded or amended, the legal default is accumulation, not distribution. The Marshals Service and the Department of Justice did not respond to Cointelegraph’s requests for comment on the latest transfers.
What to watch
The reserve mandate turns every government wallet into a de facto sovereign holder. If the 2,456 Bitcoin of unknown origin represent fresh seizures, the reserve grows by roughly $200 million at current prices without a single market buy. The next signal will be whether any of these addresses show outbound flows to exchanges, a move that would require either a policy reversal or a court order overriding the executive directive.