17,733 Bitcoin From US Wallets at Coinbase Prime

Wallets attributed to the US government moved 17,733 Bitcoin worth roughly $1.48 billion into accounts at Coinbase Prime over three days. Not one of those coins has been sold, as far as the public record goes. The gap between those two sentences is what the market tripped over on Thursday and Friday: Bitcoin fell to its October low and recovered again, and in between, leveraged positions worth more than a billion dollars were wiped out.

Here is the sequence, with the figures that are documented and the points where the counts contradict each other.

17,733 Bitcoin at Coinbase Prime: What the On-Chain Data Shows

According to an analysis by TokenPost, 17,733 BTC worth about $1.48 billion reached Coinbase Prime by October 9, spread over three days. A further 750 WBTC worth around $62 million went the same way. Caution is warranted already at this point: the WBTC figure ranges between 50 and 750 coins depending on the analysis, and anyone who attributes wallets differently arrives at different totals. A second count, based on addresses ascribed to the Bitfinex seizure complex, puts the figure at 12,267 BTC, or roughly $1.01 billion.

The range from 12,267 to 17,733 BTC is not sloppiness. It follows from an attribution that always remains an interpretation. Analytics firms label addresses using patterns, court records and earlier movements. A tag such as "US government" on an address is a reasoned assumption with a good hit rate, not an entry in an official register. Pass on either number as the single truth and you leave out the part that is disputed.