Is German government responsible for Bitcoin’s price drop during Euro 2024?

Different countries have a large share of all available Bitcoins. The United States is the largest Bitcoin Whale among governments, followed by the United Kingdom and then Germany.

The latter began selling a large portion of its Bitcoins last week, putting further pressure on the price of the largest digital coin, which has been moving sideways for weeks.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading for a price of $61,300.

Euro 2024

It was social media influencer AstekZ who sounded the alarm last week when he noted that the ‘German government are hosting the euros to distract us from the fact they’re mass dumping btc’.

German government are hosting the euros to distract us from the fact they’re mass dumping btc 💀

— Astekz ⚽️ (@astekz) June 19, 2024

The move was subsequently confirmed by Arkham Intelligence, a crypto research firm, which confirmed that the German government, which owns just under 2.5 billion euros in Bitcoin (seized early this year during the shutdown of a major illegal streaming website), sold hundreds of million dollars’ worth of Bitcoins.

The German Government is now on Arkham.

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) seized almost 50,000 BTC ($2.12B) from the operators of https://t.co/ck07DiJUAf, a film piracy website that was active in 2013.

The BKA received the Bitcoin in mid-January after a ‘voluntary… pic.twitter.com/0kC5tOPq6e

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) January 31, 2024

Whether the Euro 2024 soccer tournament has anything to do with it is doubtful, but the timing is indeed interesting. The German government of Olav Schultz is very unpopular at the moment and urgently needs fresh capital to implement some popular measures before the French elections take place end of this month.

Within a week, Germans will be reminded that the far right will more than likely win the elections in France and that could lead to further disapproval of their own government.

The US government of president Joe Biden also sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin last year. Biden’s government remains highly unpopular with voters.