The United States Supreme Court has declined to take on a case concerning the ownership of 69,370 Bitcoin — worth $4.38 billion — that the US government seized from the dark web marketplace Silk Road.
The request for review was brought by Battle Born Investments, a company that claimed it had purchased rights to the seized Bitcoin (BTC) through a bankruptcy estate.
The Supreme Court’s rebuff of the case could clear the US government to now sell the stack of Bitcoin.
Battle Born previously failed to convince a district court in 2022 and an appeals court in 2023 that it acquired the BTC through a bankruptcy claim after Silk Road shut down in 2013.
It alleged Raymond Ngan — a debtor from the bankruptcy case — was the mysterious so-called “Individual X” who stole billions of dollars of Bitcoin from Silk Road.
Both courts were not convinced, and a San Francisco appellate court judge tossed the case last year, saying the firm didn’t have a valid claim to the BTC haul.
Denial list of cases from the US Supreme Court Source: Supreme Court
Top US court only accepts 100 to 150 of the more than 7,000 cases that it’s asked to review each year
The Supreme Court’s decision means the US government’s civil forfeiture action is now far more likely to succeed, allowing it to sell the Bitcoin.
The US government already moved around $2 billion worth of the Silk Road-linked Bitcoin on July 29.
However, the transfers were tied to the Marshals Service, which uses Coinbase Prime to custody seized cryptocurrencies.
Related: Compliance experts should help regulate crypto — Silk Road 2.0 founder
Governments offloading large amounts of Bitcoin has been shown to cause considerable market volatility in the past.
This was seen firsthand when the German government sold nearly 50,000 Bitcoin — worth over $3.15 billion — over the course of a few weeks in June and July.
It’s not clear what the US intends to do with the coins, but Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump pledged to build a “strategic Bitcoin stockpile” should he win the election on Nov. 5.
Democrat candidate Kamala Harris hasn’t publicly declared what she would do with cryptocurrency seized by the US.
Silk Road was created in 2011 by Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to commit money laundering and distributing narcotics, among other convictions.
Trump promised to release Ulbricth from prison should he win the presidency.
Magazine: $3.4B of Bitcoin in a popcorn tin: The Silk Road hacker’s story
