BrokerDealer.com/blog update courtesy of extracts from today’s NYT DealBook
The United States Marshals Service announced on Tuesday that one bidder had won all of the nearly 30,000 Bitcoins auctioned on Friday.
“The U.S. Marshals Bitcoin auction resulted in one winning bidder,” Lynzey Donahue, a spokeswoman for the Marshals Service, said in a statement. “The transfer of the Bitcoins to the winner was completed today,”
But the Marshals Service did not identify the winner or disclose the winning bid.
In instructions on its website and to bidders, the Marshals Service had said it would alert both winners and losers of the auction on Monday by 5 p.m. Eastern time. The deadline for winning bidders to transfer funds to the agency, according to the website, was 5 p.m. on Tuesday.
At least a handful of bidders were sent emails on Monday notifying them that they had not won the auction. So far, many prominent bidders have said they were outbid, including a syndicate run by SecondMarket, Pantera Bitcoin, the Bitcoin Shop and Coinbase. Rangeley Capital and Alex Waters at CoinApex also said they did not win any Bitcoins.
“While we are disappointed that our syndicate did not emerge as a winner in the auction, we are pleased to see such strong interest from other bidders,” Barry Silbert, chief of SecondMarket, said in a statement on Monday. “The auction was a clear success and the result quite positive for Bitcoin.” Mr. Silbert said his syndicate had received 186 bids from 42 bidders.
The Marshals Service said on Monday that 45 registered bidders had participated in the event and that the agency had received 63 bids over the course of the auction.
Since the Marshals Service first announced the auction in early June, there have been a number of missteps. A list of potential bidders was accidentally released on June 18 in an email from the agency. And apparent typographical errors in the initial instructions posted on the Marshals Service’s website made it unclear when the registration deadlines were.
Some bidders also said other aspects of the process had been vague. Mr. Waters, for example, said on Monday that he had bid on one block of 3,000 Bitcoins at $403 each, far below the market price of Bitcoin, because he thought syndicates would not be permitted by the Marshals Service.
The full article can be found at NYT DealBook.