Lennart Ante, co-founder and CEO of the German company Blockchain Research Lab, said that the German government is not involved in selling bitcoins. According to the businessman, one of the country’s regions, Saxony, is engaged in them.

Lennart Ante reported that in January 2024, 49,857 BTC were confiscated from the owners of the Movie2k.to website, who were accused of money laundering. The expert emphasized that the bitcoins are being sold by the authorities of the Federal District of Saxony, since they have no choice – local legislation prohibits storing confiscated assets for a long time.

“The Saxony Attorney General’s Office is responsible for the liquidation of confiscated bitcoins, and the sale is not surprising. Seized assets are always liquidated within a certain period. This is a normal business process, albeit on a larger scale than usual.”

According to the head of Blockchain Research Lab, sales of the first cryptocurrency are being carried out from a wallet controlled by the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). The BKA has the infrastructure to handle such a significant amount of bitcoins and was involved in the initial investigation against Movie2k.

Ante noted that the BKA has no authority to make decisions on the sale and acts solely on the instructions of the country’s authorities. According to the expert, Saxony is trying to sell an excessively large amount of BTC at once and has already received 5,315 bitcoins back from exchanges. This indicates that there is insufficient demand in the market for such a significant amount of cryptocurrency.

Earlier, Bitcoin critic and gold investment advocate Peter Schiff said that there is currently no institutional demand for Bitcoin from market participants.