U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Hear $4.4 Billion Silk Road Bitcoin Case

On October 8, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a case involving the ownership of 69,370 bitcoins ($4.4 billion) linked to the darknet marketplace Silk Road. The move appears to clear a legal hurdle for the US government to sell the seized cryptocurrency assets. In 2022, a California federal court rejected Battle Born Investments' claim to ownership of the bitcoins. The company claimed to have purchased the rights to the bitcoins through its bankruptcy estate, but the court found that it could not prove that the debtor, Raymond Ngan, was the mysterious person who stole the bitcoins from Silk Road.2023 A federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld the decision. After the Supreme Court refused to hear Battle Born's appeal, the case was essentially dead. This means that the hurdles for the government to dispose of the funds have largely been removed. In previous news, between July and August of this year, the U.S. government had transferred about $2.6 billion worth of bitcoin to a new wallet, possibly in preparation for a sale.