Crypto Analyst Debunks Silk Road BTC Transfers by US Government

• CryptoQuant’s Ki Young Ju believes that the U.S. govt is not behind the recent Silk Road BTC transfers.
• The crypto analyst cited on-chain data to show that the government’s wallets were not involved in the transfers.
• Ju believes that the transaction patterns belong to crypto exchange wallets rather than the U.S. Govt.

Ki Young Ju, the co-founder, and CEO of on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant, believes that the recent news of the United States government transferring Bitcoins seized from the Silk Road may be inaccurate. The crypto analyst cited on-chain data to support his argument and theory.

Young Ju took to Twitter earlier today to respond to the news of the U.S. government moving the Bitcoins it had seized from the defunct online black market Silk Road. According to Ju, the wallet addresses involved in the transactions are not owned by the U.S. government. He added that the addresses did not match with any of the addresses disclosed by the government in previous court filings.

The CryptoQuant founder cited a previous tweet from fellow blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence. In May 2023, Arkham had published the wallet addresses that were used by the U.S. government to custody the BTC seized from the Silk Road hacker. According to Young Ju, none of the wallets matched the one involved in the latest transfer.

Ki Young Ju added that the transaction pattern witnessed in the latest transfer resembled that of crypto exchange wallets rather than the one controlled by the government. Ju stated that the wallets appeared to be an exchange deposit wallet and an exchange hot wallet.

Julio Moreno, the head of research at CryptoQuant, shared his thesis which stated that the 1500 BTC that were believed to be transferred by the U.S. government were sent to a change address. Moreno believes that the transfer did not affect BTC’s price because the government still has over 204,000 BTC in its wallets.