A Swedish government agency tasked for debt collection has successfully completed a bitcoin auction at above market rates.
First announced last week by the Kronofogden, Sweden’s ‘Enforcement Authority’, the Swedish government revealed its intent to sell 0.6 BTC, approx. 23,000 kroner ($3,200) at the time. The authority did not reveal the source of its bitcoin but local reports claimed that the Kronofogden obtained the cryptocurrency in assessing a debt against a company. For its part, the authority ran with the headline ‘Now you can buy bitcoin at [the] Kronofogden”.
“Assets are not just the car on the driveway or the money in a bank account,” said Kronofogden’s operations developer Johannes Paulson. “We live in a digital world, and now we are looking for assets in computers and hard drives as well as in telephones and web services.”
The government successfully auctioned off the cryptocurrency on Thursday alongside an equal amount of Bitcoin cash was also sold according to prominent Swedish publication Digital Di. The market rate for both cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and bitcoin cash, was roughly 29,000 kroner on Thursday. However, the winning bid went to an undisclosed buyer who offered a total of 43,000 kroner (approx. $6,800), a significant premium over the combined current market value of both cryptocurrencies.
The Digital Di report also reveals one of the bidders to be trading podcast Borspodden, who added they did not register the winning bid.
The Swedish government authority joins a growing list of state agencies including the US Department of Justice, the asset management entity of the South Korean government and the Australian government, among others, in selling bitcoin via public auctions.
The US government, in particular, sold 144,336 bitcoins confiscated from the Silk Road dark market operation, for a value of $48.2 million in 2015. The total worth of those auctioned-off bitcoins is over $800 million in current prices.