US DOJ — Silk Road "Individual X" Forfeiture (2020)

4°

this address's ancestry traces 4 degrees to the earliest coins

In November 2020 the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California filed a civil forfeiture complaint (case 3:20-cv-07811) against approximately 69,370 BTC that had sat untouched at a single address since April 2013. The complaint states the coins were moved out of Silk Road in 2013 through two intermediary addresses by a person it calls only "Individual X", and that the funds were obtained by the government on or about 3 November 2020. The coins were consolidated into a government-controlled address that has received but never spent. Forfeiture was contested by third-party claimants and litigated for several years afterwards.

What is and is not established. The source address and the two 2013 intermediary addresses are named verbatim in the government's own filed complaint, which is as primary as a source gets. The custody address is NOT named in any filing retrieved here — it is identified by third-party labelling services (Spark, BitInfoCharts) and corroborated by an exact match to the complaint's stated amount and date (69,370.22 BTC, 3 November 2020) against on-chain data. "Individual X" has never been publicly identified and no living individual is named. Note that the complaint's own caption truncates the address to "...FnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbh" while paragraph 17 gives the full 34-character form; the truncation is a defect in the filing, not a different address.

Address

1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx

Era

2013–2020

Sources

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