It’s surely been a stressful 24 hours for whoever oversees the United States government’s crypto wallets holding seized criminal assets.
On Thursday, over $20 million worth of assets seized in relation to the 2016 Bitfinex exchange hack suddenly were drained from a U.S. government wallet, as flagged by Arkham Intelligence, with funds quickly dispersed to exchanges and swapped for stablecoins. It looked bad—and on-chain analysts said it appeared to be theft.
But then on Friday morning, the vast majority of the funds (about $19.3 million worth) suddenly came flooding back into the wallet. Soon after, they were sent to a new wallet, presumably as the U.S. government attempted to better secure the coins.
Was it a white-hat attack from an ethical hacker, and the U.S. offered a sliver of the funds as a bounty for a safe return? That’s still unclear, and the Department of Justice has yet to comment or reply to our requests.
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