US government wallets move $103 million in bitcoin and BNB

Coins seized by the US government were on the move this week. Wallets tied to the government transferred about 833.6 bitcoin, worth roughly $71.6 million, and 40,285 BNB, worth about $31.6 million, according to data from the analytics firm Arkham cited by CoinDesk, Crypto Briefing and Bitcoin.com News.

The bitcoin went first to two unlabeled addresses and then, within hours, to deposit addresses at Coinbase Prime, the exchange's service for institutions, CoinDesk reported.

The coins come from criminal cases. About 569 bitcoin were forfeited in the prosecution of Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin, who ran the HashFlare cloud-mining scheme, and about 265 came from the 2016 Bitfinex hack. The BNB traces to the FTX and Alameda Research case.

A transfer is not a sale, and none has been confirmed. Under a March 2025 executive order, bitcoin forfeited to the government is meant to be held in a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Other seized tokens, such as BNB, are not covered in the same way.

It was the government's first bitcoin movement since August 26, Bitcoin.com News reported. The amounts are small next to what it holds: roughly 323,700 bitcoin, worth about $27.7 billion.

What to watch is whether the coins leave Coinbase Prime's deposit addresses, and whether any agency says why they were moved.