THE U.S. GOVERNMENT MOVES 833.6 SEIZED BITCOIN — THE COINS COME FROM HASHFLARE AND THE BITFINEX HACK — BOTH CASES HAVE VICTIMS, AND THE RESERVE ORDER LETS THOSE COINS GO
Around 11 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, wallets that Arkham Intelligence labels as the U.S. government moved 833.6 bitcoin, according to Bitcoin.com News and CoinDesk. About 568.7 BTC came from the HashFlare case against Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin. About 264.9 BTC came from the 2016 Bitfinex hack. CoinDesk traced the coins through two unlabeled addresses to addresses Arkham tags as Coinbase Prime deposits. 40,285 BNB seized from Alameda Research moved too. No agency has said why. CoinDesk put it plainly: “A transfer is not the same as a sale.”
The rule everyone reaches for is the March 6, 2025 executive order. It says bitcoin deposited into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve “shall not be sold.” But the reserve is built only from bitcoin “finally forfeited,” and the same order lets agencies part with coins “returned to identifiable and verifiable victims of crime,” used in law enforcement operations, shared with state and local police, or released as a court orders.
Both of these cases have victims in line. The Justice Department said in August 2025 that the HashFlare forfeiture “will be available for a remission process to compensate victims of the crime.” The Bitfinex coins have been fought over since prosecutors asked in January 2025 to return about 94,643 BTC to the exchange in kind. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly questioned that, and CryptoSlate reported in February 2026 that competing claims were still being contested. Coins still in that fight are not finally forfeited, so by the order’s own words they are not reserve coins yet.
So if these coins are sold, the order allows it, and the money may reach people who were robbed. That is the honest reading, and it is also the gap: a reserve that “shall not be sold” shrinks every time a court finds an owner, and nobody announces which move is which. This one is about 0.26% of the roughly 323,694 BTC Arkham attributes to the government. The state’s promises live in a document. Its coins live on a public ledger, and the ledger is the one that updates in real time. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,004.