Silk Road Bitcoins to Cause Insignificant Selling Pressure, CryptoQuant Says

Cryptocurrency analytics firm CryptoQuant has opined that the potential selling pressure that will stem from the U.S. government's possible sale of Silk Road-related Bitcoins would have a rather negligible impact on the market in the long term. 

It pointed to the fact that the realized cap of Bitcoin, the metric that shows the value of all coins at the price when they were last moved on-chain, currently stands at $381.7 billion. The potential selling pressure from the Silk Road-linked coins would be $6.5 billion, meaning that the long-term impact of such a sale will not be significant. 

The selling will also have little impact on the market in the short term if these coins are sold via an over-the-counter (OTC) desk. 

That said, if transactions are conducted through exchanges, they will have a noticeable market impact. 

As reported by U.Today, the U.S. government recently secured a court order that will make it possible to liquidate a total of 67,000 coins that were handed over by "Individual X," the mysterious figure who hacked the account of the now-defunct Silk Road marketplace more than a decade ago. 

Back in November 2020, the U.S. government said that it had filed a civil action to forfeit several thousand Bitcoins linked to "Individual X." This was the largest confiscation of cryptocurrency by the government to date. 

Recently, the court ruled against some claimants who were attempting to make the government disclose the identity of the hacker.