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Where the US Government’s Silk Road Bitcoin Went

We traced the bitcoin seized from Silk Road thief James Zhong to the end of the trail: about 40,000 BTC reached Coinbase-labeled addresses, and 9,800 BTC have sat still since December 2024.

By Divyasshree · Blockchain Intelligence

Cover Image for Where the US Government’s Silk Road Bitcoin Went

The US government holds some of the largest known Bitcoin wallets, and almost all of the coins in them came from criminal cases. Because the coins sit on a public ledger, anyone can follow what the government does with them. We traced the two biggest Silk Road seizures with the Bitquery MCP server on 30 October 2026.

Key findings

The 69,370 BTC seized from a hacker the court papers call "Individual X" sit in one address that has never sent a coin.
The 49,826 bitcoin that passed through the government wallet for James Zhong's coins were spent in steps between March 2023 and December 2024. About 40,026 BTC went to addresses labeled as Coinbase, in five batches.
The last 9,800 moved on 2 December 2024 to an address with no label in our data. They have not moved since.

The two seizures

Individual X. In November 2020 the Justice Department filed a civil forfeiture complaint for about 69,370 BTC that a hacker had taken from the Silk Road market in 2012 and 2013. The hacker, unnamed in the filing, agreed to hand the coins over.

James Zhong. In November 2021, agents searched Zhong's home and seized more than 50,676 BTC, according to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Zhong had tricked Silk Road's withdrawal system in 2012 by setting up accounts, depositing coins and pulling them out many times over. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud.

Individual X: 69,370 coins, never spent

Prompt: Profile bitcoin address bc1qa5wkgaew2dkv56kfvj49j0av5nml45x9ek9hz6. Who funded it, and has it ever sent anything?

Tools: btc_address_flow_summary, then labels_for_addresses

The address received 69,370.17 BTC from one sender, 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx, which label data from Arkham and MetaSleuth marks as the Silk Road hacker. The first coins arrived on 3 November 2020. In total the address has received 69,370.18 BTC across 197 outputs. The extra 0.02 is dust from more than 200 other addresses, a common way to tag or spam a famous address. It has never sent a single coin.

In March 2025 an executive order set up a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and said that government bitcoin placed in it "shall not be sold". The ledger cannot tell you which reserve a coin sits in. It can only say that these coins are where they landed in 2020.

James Zhong: 49,826 coins, five transfers to Coinbase

The government wallet bc1qmxjefnuy06v345v6vhwpwt05dztztmx4g3y7wp received 49,825.72 BTC between March 2022 and February 2023. That is less than the 50,676 seized: the rest took another route that we did not trace here. By 12 July 2023 the wallet was empty.

Prompt: Follow every bitcoin that left bc1qmxjef…7wp until it reaches an exchange or stops moving. Label each address.

Tools: btc_address_flow_summary at each step, btc_tx_flow for the split transactions, labels_for_addresses

Date	Bitcoin moved	Where it went
7 Mar 2023	9,825.72	Coinbase deposit address `367YoR…G4k`
7 Mar 2023	30,174.70	Government wallet `bc1qf2yv…8fs`
7 Mar 2023	8,999.91	Government wallet `bc1qe7nk…rdg`
12 Jul 2023	8,200.00	Coinbase deposit address `361yog…ikj`
12 Jul 2023	1,118.73	Government wallet `bc1qpg8e…mu7`
12 Jul 2023	506.55	Government wallet `bc1q77n0…gup`
2 Apr 2024	2,000.00	Coinbase wallet `3KrZVU…vX2`
2 Apr 2024	29,799.99	Government wallet `bc1qjet9…zde`, then split on 29 Jul 2024
14 Aug 2024	10,000.00	Coinbase wallet `33JEEi…noE`
2 Dec 2024	10,000.00	Coinbase wallet `33Tgpo…BShW`
2 Dec 2024	9,799.99	`bc1qxkhw…7p6`, no label, unspent since

The 12 July transfer of 8,200 used the 8,999.91 from March plus 318.82 more from the Zhong wallet; the 1,118.73 was its change. On 2 April 2024 the three government wallets were merged into one transaction. The Coinbase rows add up to 40,025.72 BTC. With the 9,799.99 still parked, that accounts for the whole 49,825.72 BTC, apart from network fees.

The first batch is close to the court record. A filing in Zhong's case on 31 March 2023 said the government had sold 9,861.17 BTC on 14 March for about $215.7 million and planned to sell the rest in four more batches. The Coinbase batch on 7 March is 35 BTC smaller than the sale, so some coins came from elsewhere. On-chain, four more Coinbase transfers followed.

A deposit at an exchange is not proof of a sale. Government agencies also use exchanges as custodians. The court filing confirms the March 2023 sale. For the later batches, the ledger shows only the transfers.

What the 2023 version got wrong

The first version of this post, written in December 2023, read the trail differently. Two of its claims no longer hold:

"8,200 BTC went to a third-party address and fanned out to 10 wallets." Address 361yog…ikj is labeled as a Coinbase deposit address. Its "fan-out" was Coinbase moving coins between its own wallets. The same goes for 3FZ4Y…K4g, which the post traced as a holder of 17,000 coins: it is labeled as a Coinbase wallet.
"The 30,174 and the 1,119 bitcoin have not moved and are still with the government." Both claims were true in December 2023. Both moved on 2 April 2024, and their trail ends in the table above.

Labels change what a trail means. Run every address through a label lookup before you call a pattern "laundering" or "fan-out".

Trace a government wallet yourself

In the browser: MoneyFlow Lite draws the money flow for a Bitcoin address, with labels, and lets you go hop by hop. It draws on your Bitquery API quota, so it works on the 7-day trial.
With an AI client: connect the Bitquery MCP server at https://mcp.bitquery.io and ask the questions above. Tracing and labels sit on the AI Investigation MCP plan, at $149 per month on the pricing page.

Sources and method

Transfers and balances come from Bitquery's Bitcoin index, read through the MCP server on 30 October 2026. Labels come from Bitquery's label database, which draws on outside providers (MetaSleuth, Arkham and DefiLlama for the addresses here). The government labels are not court records, so we tie each wallet to a seizure through the transfer trail and the official documents linked above. A label on a single address can be wrong. Treat the Coinbase labels as strong but not certain.