Yesterday the USA government moved almost 300 ETH, with a total value of nearly $700,000.
The data published on the webpage of Arkham Intelligence, which monitors the on-chain movements of known public addresses belonging to U.S. government authorities, reveal it.
US Government: the movement of funds
This is not the first movement ever of these addresses.
There have indeed been others, both in BTC and in ETH, and of even much higher amounts.
According to the movements tracked by Arkham Intelligence, at the end of July they sent 10,000 BTC to an unidentified wallet, while in April they transferred almost 2 billion dollars in Bitcoin to Coinbase.
Even in the case of the transfer of 300 ETH yesterday, the recipient’s address has not yet been identified.
When, as in this case, the owner of the recipient’s address of the transaction is not known, it is also possible to imagine, among the many hypotheses, that it is simply another unknown address belonging to the same sender. In this hypothetical case, it would only be a technical internal movement without interest.
The ETH of the USA government
It does not appear that the USA government has ever bought cryptocurrencies.
Despite this, it appears to possess more than 200,000 BTC and over 50,000 ETH.
In total, it holds more than 11.1 billion dollars in cryptocurrencies, of which 10.7 billion in Bitcoin, 121 million dollars in USDT, 117 million in ETH, 39 in WBTC and the rest in BNB and other stablecoins.
These are generally tokens that have been seized by authorities from criminals or individuals under investigation for some crime. For this reason, they are transferred to the wallets of U.S. government authorities, particularly those of the Department of Justice, and then over time either returned (which happens very rarely) or sold.
This means that when they are transferred to addresses whose ownership is unknown, there is always the risk that the transfer is preparatory to a sale.
The impact on the price
Yesterday afternoon, when the above movement was made, the price of ETH not only did not react negatively, but it was even in a moment of slight rise.
When the news started to spread on X, the price of Ethereum did indeed drop a bit, but too little to think that the news had a real impact. In fact, that drop lasted very little, and afterwards the price recovered significantly.
The fact is that in these cases, that is when the owner of the recipient address of the transaction is not known, the most probable hypothesis is often that of a simple internal movement to an address that belongs to the same sender but it is not known that it belongs to him.
Furthermore, after the collapse of the price of Ethereum from $3,100 to $2,200 that occurred in recent days, a rebound was to be expected, and in fact today it has risen above $2,500.
Although it is by no means certain that this rebound is solid and lasting, the -30% in three days appeared to be a clear case of excessive fear, or even panic, on the part of the financial markets.
Moreover, in cases like this, the large and sudden crashes are often mainly due to technical reasons, and in particular to large amounts of forced liquidations of leveraged positions, so they last a short time (or very short) and then return to a sort of normality.
In a scenario like this, it was objectively difficult for news such as that of a possible internal movement of 300 ETH on the wallets of the US government authorities to have a significant impact on the price.
The future trend
At this moment there is still a lot of uncertainty in the crypto markets, also because they are influenced by traditional financial markets which in turn still have a lot of uncertainty.
However, the collapse of the last few days seems to have ended, and if it was really caused mainly by an excess of panic, this seems to have run its course, for now.
Obviously, no one knows if there could be other episodes of this kind, or not, but after such a discharge, it is possible that for some time the movements will be of lesser magnitude.
