The French government has made the decision to sell 611 Bitcoins in an auction that will take place this week. The auction will be held by the French Agency for the Recovery and Management of Seized and Confiscated Assets (FRAMA). At the beginning of this month, the local news firm Cyberguere reported that French authorities had seized a significant amount of cryptocurrency funds as a result of the hacking of the exchange service GateHub in 2019. At the time, the thieved cryptocurrency funds included XRP from Ripple, which the authorities may have converted to Bitcoin.
Given the current price of Bitcoin, the quantity of cryptocurrency that is being auctioned off is estimated to be worth more than $34 million at this point.
Those who wanted to take part in the auction needed to register prior to March 13 in order to do so. The auction is scheduled to take place on March 17 at 9 a.m., and it will feature a total of 437 lot sizes, the smallest of which is worth 0.11 BTC and the largest of which is worth 2 BTC.
In the meantime, federal officials in the United States government anticipate holding an auction this week to sell 0.7501 BTC, which at the current price would be equivalent to approximately $42,268. However, neither the origin of the cryptocurrency funds nor the reason for this action have been made clear at this time.
It is common practise for government agencies to sell Bitcoins that have been seized through auctions. The Finnish Customs Authority made headlines at the beginning of the year when it announced that it would be selling Bitcoins that had been previously seized in connection with criminal investigations related to drug trafficking. The agency was able to seize 1,666 Bitcoins, which were worth approximately $860,000 at the time of the seizure, according to local reports.