Kronofodgen, Sweden’s Enforcement Agency is to sell 4.59 bitcoin – worth about $38,234 – on Friday afternoon in an online auction, according to Swedish news website TheLocal.
The agency declined to disclose where the bitcoin funds had come from, but its operations developer Johanees Paulson explained the reason for the auction, rather than a direct sale. He said:
Many people ask us why we’re auctioning off the currency and not converting it ourselves. The answer is that there isn’t an infrastructure which meets our needs. We need to do it in a quality-assured way, in order to be sure that the money won’t disappear on the way.
Previous Sale’s Success
Meanwhile, if history repeats itself, the agency will make more money from an auction than a direct sale. In a similar event in 2017, the highest bid was $5,243 for 0.6 bitcoin, worth around $3,365 at the time.
In September, Wilsons Auctions raised £300,000 ($378,300) from the sale of bitcoin, ether and XRP seized by UK police. It also raised more than the market value of the tokens on offer and marked the first time the UK police had instructed the sale of a criminal’s seized cryptocurrency.
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