German authorities seized a record $2.17 billion worth of Bitcoin from pirate websites

German police said the seizure was the largest in the country’s history.

German authorities successfully confiscated 50,000 Bitcoin, worth $2.17 billion, from a pirate website in mid-January, according to a January 30 statement by the Saxony State Police.

The seizure relates to an ongoing investigation into the unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works under the Copyright Act and subsequent commercial Money Laundering. The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and an IT company with undisclosed information from Munich are working together in an investigation.

According to authorities, two unnamed suspects have been identified, including a 40-year-old German man and a 37-year-old Polish man. One of them voluntarily transferred the flagship digital asset to the Address provided by BKA.

At the same time, this marks the largest asset seizure by the German police, and the authorities have not yet determined how to use the seized Bitcoin.

It is worth noting that this is not the first time that German authorities have confiscated Bitcoin. In 2022, they confiscated top digital assets worth around €23 million after dismantling the server infrastructure of illegal Deep Web marketplace Hydra.

Similarly, the U.S. government has also carried out a large number of seizures of top Crypto Assets. In recent years, more than 50,000 BTC, worth $3.6 billion, related to the defunct Deep Web marketplace Silk Road, were confiscated from James Zhu.

The U.S. has also been aggressively divesting its Bitcoin holdings. On January 25, the government revealed plans to sell $130 million in Crypto Assets.

Despite this sell-off, data from the Arkham Intelligence platform shows that the U.S. government still holds more than 216,000 units of BTC, worth $9.56 billion, at press time.