This past Friday’s bitcoin auction held by the United States Marshals Service has seemingly been talk of the town, and now, the service has released some information with regard to Friday’s happenings today in a chat with bitcoin news website CoinDesk.
A total of 45 bidders registered for the auction (with one of the requirements being the need to wire a $200,000 deposit from a US bank account), with 63 bids submitted during the twelve hours the auction ran, from 6 am to 6 pm East coast time.
Unfortunately, the juicy information such as who won and how much their bid was worth is still being withheld by the Marshals service. According to CoinDesk, a spokesperson said that “The award process is ongoing, so we do not have the final number of winning bidders yet.”
SecondMarket and Bitcoin Investment Trust CEO Barry Silbert announced this weekend the results of his bidding syndicate for the coins up for grabs during this auction. The syndicate was formed to allow smaller-scale investors to participate in the auction.
In that syndicate were 42 bidders, 186 bids, and a bitcoin bid quantity of 48,013.
Silbert’s Bitcoin Investment Trust wasn’t the old high-profile company to get involved with this auction. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Boston-based Circle Internet Financial also participated, as did Pantera Capital and The Bitcoin Shop.
This auction made available 29,656.51306529 bitcoins worth nearly $18.5 million at the time of this writing. The auction took place in two series.
The first series (dubbed Series A) had nine blocks of 3,000 bitcoins available. Series B has one block of 2,656.51306529 bitcoins available.
Certainly, it will be interesting to see how the auction results panned out, but it may be another day or so until we find out more. Stay tuned for the latest.