Germany finishes dumping $3 billion worth of bitcoin seized from Movie2k

Significant bitcoin market price fluctuations have been caused by the Saxony public prosecutor’s office since June 19th.

Germany has sold all of the almost 50,000 bitcoins it seized from the pirated content streaming platform Movie2k.to in mid-January, as revealed by the statistics from the crypto on-chain analytics platform Arkham.

The last 3,094 bitcoins from the wallet dubbed “German Goverment (BKA),” worth about $180 million, were gone on July 12th. The wallet started dumping bitcoin on June 19th, moving nearly 6,500 BTC in a single day.

The wallet’s balance, which peaked at $3.6 billion in March, now stands at $321.

German authorities never officially confirmed these transactions but did not deny them either, according to Heise.de reporting.

The sales caused significant Bitcoin price fluctuations. In the last month, the BTC price fell from more than $70,000 to less than $54,000 and has now bounced back to almost $63,000.

The illegal streaming platform Movie2k obtained bitcoins between 2011 and 2013 as advertising revenue from its website. During that time, the price of bitcoin fluctuated between 2 and 230 euros. The bitcoin price is now 274-31,500 times higher than the original amount paid to acquire them. The entire stash of 50,000 bitcoins is worth about $3.15 billion.

The sales were processed on the over-the-counter (OTC) market, where parties agreed on the price, instead of the regular exchanges, according to Heise. Before the sales, some Bundestag (German Parliament) members called on the government to keep bitcoins as a hedge against inflation in the state reserve.

Two individuals ­– a 40-year-old German man and a 37-year-old Polish man – are suspects for their involvement with the German piracy website that operated until May 2013. The bitcoins were “voluntarily transferred” by one of the suspects to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).