Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $62,000, roughly 7% above the $57,900 average price Germany received for the 49,858 BTC it sold in 2024. Arkham Intelligence says a 6% slide would push the market below the government’s exit level.
The on-chain analytics firm flagged the threshold, tracking every wallet movement when Germany liquidated the stash between June 19 and July 12, 2024.
Germany Bitcoin Sale Becomes a Market Reference Point
Saxon authorities seized roughly 50,000 BTC in January 2024 from the operators of the piracy site Movie2K.
Because German law treats prompt liquidation of seized assets as standard procedure, the government concluded its sell-offs in just 23 days, routing coins through Kraken, Bitstamp, Coinbase, Cumberland, and Flow Traders.
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The sale drew two years of criticism, and as Bitcoin doubled after the liquidation, calculations based on a one-year retrospective showed that the stash would have fetched over $6.6 billion, making Germany’s 2024 move the worst economic mistake of the decade.
“I feel very sad for the German people. Among all the bad decisions being made for the country at the moment, this turns out to be the worst,” one Bitcoin investor noted at the time.
A 6% Drop Would Rewrite the Sold-Too-Early Narrative
However, the 2026 correction has changed the comparison. Bitcoin recently fell below $60,000 on Binance and Coinbase for the first time since 2024, while spot ETFs bled $4.33 billion during a 13-day outflow streak.
At current prices, Germany’s exit no longer looks like a historic blunder. The gap between the market and the government’s average sale price has narrowed from over 100% at the 2025 peak to under 7%.
In retrospect, however, 2024 was a bad year for governments divesting from crypto. The likes of El Salvador and Bhutan, deliberately accumulated Bitcoin, while Germany tried to get rid of it.
Under President Biden, the US also began liquidating its holdings. Between these two nations and Ukraine, which also performed a complete liquidation, state-owned reserves dropped by 12%.
Neither China nor the UK acquired or disposed of any assets that year.
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