The auction attracted 45 bidders, including New York brokerage SecondMarket Inc., and 63 bids were submitted during the 12 hours of the auction on June 27, according to the US Marshals Service. The agency, which said yesterday that it notified the bidder and transferred the money, didn’t disclose the winner’s identity.
The auction of 29,656 bitcoins, part of more than 144,000 the FBI transferred to US Marshals after shutting down the Silk Road marketplace and arresting its operator last year, represented a rare opportunity to secure a large cache of the virtual currency.
While the actual price of the winning bid isn’t known, the cache sold on June 30 was worth about US$19 million at current exchange prices.
SecondMarket, Rangeley Capital, Pantera Capital Management, Bitcoin Shop and Coinbase Inc. said they were outbid in the auction.
Dan Morehead, chief executive officer of Pantera, said that the spectacle of the US government auctioning bitcoins suggested that “supply creates its own demand.”
“The publicity created a tremendous amount of demand,” Morehead wrote in an e-mail. “We had several large new players bid.”
Charles Allen, CEO of Bitcoin Shop, said his company’s bid wasn’t accepted.
“As a mechanism to hedge our proposed investment, we also bid through the SecondMarket syndicate for a smaller allocation, but that bid was not accepted either,” Allen said. “We submitted a bid price that, if accepted, reflected our determination of a competitive and attractive value for our investors.”
July 02, 2014 at 12:22AM
Latest Bitcoin News | BTC/LTC Robot | Mining ASICS | BTC Debit Card
