Where did China’s 190,000 Bitcoins go?

In our crypto industry, there has always been a widely circulated saying that governments of various countries have long held Bitcoin, of which the US government holds 215,000 Bitcoins and the Chinese government holds 190,000 Bitcoins.

The source of this saying is the "PlusToken", the largest case in the crypto industry that year

In 2018, the PlustToken platform quietly spread in the currency circle. The platform used digital currency financial management as a package and lured millions of people to participate with high interest.

According to Beijing Daily, in early 2019, the Yancheng Public Security Bureau set up a special task force to investigate the "Plus Token" platform.

In March 2020, the Ministry of Public Security deployed public security organs across the country to arrest all 82 core members suspected of pyramid scheme crimes.

In this case, the public security organs seized a total of 190,000 bitcoins, more than 27.24 million EOS coins, 830,000 Ethereum coins, etc. This case involves a total of 9 digital currencies including Dogecoin, Bitcoin, Dash, and Tether.

A criminal lawyer said that after the platform is identified as a pyramid scheme organization, generally only the organizers and leaders are held criminally responsible, which constitutes the crime of organizing and leading pyramid scheme activities. In judicial practice, other participants are generally not identified as criminal victims.

Therefore, after the relevant illegal gains are recovered, they will be confiscated according to law and all turned over to the state treasury.

According to relevant media reports, this batch of digital currency assets is worth 4.2 billion US dollars.

The 190,000 bitcoins confiscated in this case are the source of the claim that the Chinese government holds 190,000 bitcoins.

Today, this batch of bitcoins is worth 12.7 billion US dollars at 67,000 US dollars per bitcoin!

But if you think that these 190,000 bitcoins will be held until today, that may be too naive

Since 2020, Yancheng's fines and confiscations have been on the top of the list. A reporter once called the relevant office of the Yancheng Finance Bureau to inquire about the reasons for the increase in fines and confiscations.

The relevant staff said, "The proportion of traffic fines is now very small, mainly because major economic cases such as fraud have been cracked, so the public security fines and confiscations are more."

In addition, Wu said that the blockchain said that after communicating with many OTC merchants, it was determined that a large part of the coins involved in the Token Plus case were sold during the period of BTC$7000-$12000 from the end of 2019 to the middle of 2020. The statement in the verdict that "the funds and proceeds obtained shall be confiscated according to law and turned over to the state treasury" also confirms this statement to some extent.

At the end of 2020, after address tracking and analysis, a big V believed that there seemed to be 15,000 BTC that had not been sold, and the addresses of 830,000 Ethereum had not changed.

If this is the case, the market value of the undisposed digital currency is about more than 3 billion US dollars, which is equivalent to the value of 23.7 billion yuan announced by Yancheng at the end of 2023.

If Yancheng really disposed of that batch of tokens, then there really aren’t many left now. . .