THE FBI WANTS 19 BITCOIN ADDRESSES BLOCKED — FIVE MINING POOLS HAVE CONFIRMED EIGHT PAYMENTS TO THEM — FOUNDRY USA AND MARA AMONG THEM

On October 31, 2026, the FBI urged private businesses to “block transactions with or derived from” addresses used to launder the Binance theft, and listed 19 bitcoin addresses. CoinDesk reported the request at 01:10 UTC on November 1. Eight transactions paying those 19 have confirmed since. I read all eight and looked up who mined each block.

Five mining pools confirmed them. ViaBTC mined three and F2Pool two. Foundry USA, MARA Pool and SECPOOL mined one each. Block 974,088, at 06:11 UTC on November 1, carries the words “Foundry USA Pool #dropgold.” Block 974,108, at 09:20 UTC the same day, carries “MARA Made in USA.” The payments are dust, 27,286 sats in all, sent in from other wallets. One paid 1,111 sats to each of the 19 with the note “help me bro.” Another wrote, “Brother, I’ve gone bankrupt. Could you help me with some funds.”

This isn’t defiance. The alert names “THORNode operators, RPC node operators, instant exchanges, DeFi services, blockchain analytics firms, and other virtual asset service providers.” It doesn’t name miners, and it doesn’t say whether a stranger’s dust counts. The 19 aren’t on OFAC’s sanctions list either; the file I checked last changed October 28, the day before the theft. But pools have filtered before. Marathon, now MARA, dropped “OFAC-compliant” mining in 2021 after an outcry. F2Pool’s founder confirmed a “tx filtering patch” after a 2023 analysis by the developer b10c, who wrote in January 2025 that F2Pool “might be filtering OFAC-sanctioned transactions again.” This list didn’t stop F2Pool on November 1 or November 3. Eight payments are too few to say anything about AntPool, which mined 60 of the 334 blocks from 974,056 to 974,389 and none of these.

None of this is the real test. At block 974,389, the 18,270 bitcoin on those addresses still hadn’t moved, on two block explorers. When they do, the thief needs one pool to take the fee, not all of them. A pool can refuse a transaction. It can’t stop the next pool from mining it. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $77,507.