US FBI — Silk Road / Ulbricht Seizure (2013)

4°

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

After the October 2013 takedown of Silk Road, US law enforcement moved coins from the marketplace and from Ross Ulbricht's seized hardware into a single publicly known consolidation address, in a long series of transfers reported at the time. Contemporary coverage noted the transfers were sent in chunks of 324 BTC, a number that spells "FBI" on a phone keypad. On-chain the address has received roughly 144,343 BTC in total across more than a thousand outputs and has since been almost entirely spent. The coins were subsequently disposed of through US Marshals Service auctions in 2014 and 2015.

What is and is not established. The address was never published by the FBI in a court filing or press release that could be retrieved here; it was identified contemporaneously by journalists and blockchain observers in October 2013 and has been universally treated as the FBI seizure address since. It is corroborated by an on-chain total (~144,343 BTC funded) that matches the ~144,336 BTC the government said it seized from Ulbricht. The USMS auction payout addresses are deliberately left null — no fetched source listed them.

Address

1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH

Era

2013–2015

Sources

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