US Marshals: One Auction Bidder Claimed All 30,000 Silk Road Bitcoins
UPDATE (2nd July 14:07 BST): Venture capitalist Tim Draper has been revealed as the winner of last Friday’s USMS bitcoin auction.
The US Marshals Service (USMS) has announced that a single, undisclosed bidder claimed all of the roughly 30,000 bitcoins seized from online black market Silk Road and sold in its recent auction.
The winning bidder outbid all other parties for the 10 auction blocks, according to the USMS. Further, the bitcoins have already been transferred to the winner, according to Blockchain.
The USMS previously said that it would begin notifying bidders as to whether they had secured any of the blocks on 30th June. The auction took place on Friday, 27th June over a 12-hour span.
In a statement, the USMS said:
“The US Marshals Bitcoin auction resulted in one winning bidder. The transfer of the bitcoins to the winner was completed today.”
The auction was structured into 10 blocks, with the first nine consisting of 3,000 BTC and the last one featuring 2,656.51306529 BTC.
Results trickle in
The news follows an earlier announcement from the USMS on 30th June, when the agency said that 45 registered bidders took part in the process. At the time, the federal agency didn’t have a clear number on the final amount of winning bids.
The USMS released the auction date and procedural details last month. At the time, the federal agency outlined how participants could express interest in the roughly $18 million worth of bitcoin.
Since then, a number of key bidders, including SecondMarket founder and CEO Barry Silbert, have outlined their participation in the auction. Silbert later announced via Twitter that his auction syndicate, which consisted of 42 bidders for a total of 186 bids, was outbid on every bitcoin block.
The syndicate formed just part of a broader pool of known or possible bidders, a number of which were inadvertently released by the USMS. Other bidders included Pantera Capital and Bitcoin Shop, both of which have confirmed that they did not enter the winning bid.
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