USMS: A Single Bidder Claimed All Bitcoins in Last Week’s Auction

Some new information is surfacing with regard to the highly-publicized bitcoin auction held by the United States Marshals Service (USMS) last week. That auction ran for twelve hours from 6am – 6pm.

We’re learning via a CoinDesk report that the USMS has announced that a single bidder has claimed all 29,656.51306529 bitcoins, which were made available in nine blocks of 3,000 coins, and one block of 2,656.51306529 bitcoins.

The Service said the following in a Tuesday statement:

The US Marshals Bitcoin auction resulted in one winning bidder. The transfer of the bitcoins to the winner was completed today.

According to an agenda provided by the Marshals Service, the winning bidder was notified on or before 5pm Eastern time on Monday, June 30th. That bidder was then responsible for wiring the agreed-upon amount by today, July 1st.

We can assume that has happens, since the Service made note of the fact that the bitcoins have been transfer, a transaction that can be viewed on Blockchain.info here (bonus: tons of interesting signed messages in there).

It will be up to the winner to decide whether he/she/they will want to publicly reveal themselves — something many in the bitcoin community hopes will happen soon. They are, however, under no obligation.

Barry Silbert recently came out to announce that his syndicate was outbid on all blocks, as did Pantera Capital. Earlier today, The Bitcoin Shop also announced they too were outbid on all blocks.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the prevailing bidder will come out in the days/weeks ahead announcing their victory. Do you think we’re likely to see this happen?