On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States government is now among the largest holders of cryptocurrency in the world, with roughly 200,000 bitcoin worth billions of dollars, according to an analysis of public fillings by the crypto-firm 21.co.

Combined, hardware wallets operated by the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and other US government agencies are holding 194,188 bitcoin, with an estimated value of $5.3 billion according to figures from 21.com which noted that these were “lower-bound estimations of the US government holdings based on publicly available information.”

The crypto-firm’s analysis followed bitcoin moving into and out of US government accounts which were associated with the three largest seizures of bitcoin seen since 2020.

One of the instances cited in the report was the intervention in the Bitfinex hacking which occurred in January of 2022. The intervention took almost six years to unwind, and ended with the government taking possession of 94,643 bitcoin. In another example, in the James Zhong seizure of March 2022, the government took possession of 51,326 bitcoin. The most famous example would probably be the shutdown of the online drug marketplace Silk Road, of November 2020, in which the government seized 69,369 bitcoin.

Reportedly, the digital assets have been maintained mostly in offline encrypted storage devices which are kept by the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

The government periodically sells off portions of the seized cryptocurrency through an auction system, which operates based on court liquidation orders. The most well-known such auction was in 2014, when the government sold 30,000 bitcoin to billionaire Tim Draper.

More recently the government has been selling the tokens on exchanges, such as earlier this year, when a public filing shows that the government sold 9,118 bitcoin on Coinbase.