Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau seized a third batch of 500 BTC on July 2, bringing total recoveries in the case to 1,500 BTC. The coins sit in wallets linked to Clifton Collins, whose priva
Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau has taken control of another 500 BTC, worth close to $31 million, the agency confirmed on July 2. It is the third recovery this year from a cluster of dormant wallets tied to Clifton Collins, a convicted cannabis grower who insists he lost his private keys nearly a decade ago. The bureau’s running total for the case now stands at 1,500 BTC, more than $90 million at current prices. Nine wallets from the same batch, holding roughly 4,500 BTC, have not moved yet.
CAB announced the seizure through official statements on Facebook and X, crediting Europol with operational coordination, technical expertise and decryption support. Neither agency named the wallet owner. The link to Collins comes from Irish press reporting and from on-chain intelligence firm Arkham, which labels the addresses as his lost-keys cluster. Blockchain tracker Lookonchain watched the 500 coins land in Coinbase Prime around July 2, with bitcoin trading near $61,749 at the time.
Each recovery has followed the same sequence. A wallet dormant since 2017 suddenly moves 500 BTC, the funds arrive at an institutional custody or trading venue, and CAB confirms a seizure shortly afterward. In March, after ten years of silence, an address from the cluster sent 500 BTC, then worth $35.4 million, toward Coinbase Prime. The Block reported that the coins were quickly dispersed across dozens of addresses, with $13.5 million flowing into the exchange, while Garda Síochána declined to comment. In May, CAB and Europol secured a second wallet, routing the funds through a Wintermute deposit address. July brought the third tranche, again to Coinbase Prime.
Month (2026)AmountValue at transferDestinationMarch500 BTC$35.4MCoinbase PrimeMay500 BTCnot disclosedWintermute deposit addressJuly500 BTC~$30.9MCoinbase PrimeSeized coins rarely end up at institutional custody desks unless the state plans to sell them once the legal process allows it.
According to a 2020 investigation by the Irish Times, Collins worked as a security guard and later a beekeeper before switching fully to cannabis cultivation around 2005. He rented properties in Cornamona, Kells and Drumlish, harvested every 16 weeks or so, and sold to dealers in Dublin. A Garda patrol noticed his Lexus parked in the Wicklow Mountains at 2:30 a.m. on February 7, 2017. A search turned up about €2,000 worth of cannabis and led investigators to his Galway property, where they found more than 500 plants valued near €406,000.
Collins bought roughly 6,000 BTC in 2011-2012 at an average price near $5 per coin, an outlay of about $30,000. He split the holdings into 12 wallets of 500 BTC each and wrote the private keys on a single A4 sheet, hidden inside the aluminium cap of a fishing rod case at his rented house. That sheet disappeared in 2017, after his arrest, when the landlord cleared out his belongings. Collins claims the rod was stolen before the landlord ever entered the property. A court sentenced him to five years in 2020 and ordered forfeiture of all his crypto assets; he personally surrendered about 89 BTC and said the access codes for the rest were gone. At bitcoin’s October 2025 peak, the full stash was worth around $757 million.
The High Court had already classified the coins as proceeds of crime around 2019, but at that point the authorities had no technical means to move them. On-chain records show zero activity between the 2017 arrest and the first recovery in March 2026. For scale: over the previous decade, Irish authorities had sold a total of only about €6.5 million in crypto assets.
Both agencies have kept silent on how the wallets were opened, saying only that Europol hosted operational meetings at its Hague headquarters. Analysts circle around two main theories: weak passwords on the original wallet files that gave way to brute-force attacks, or defects in the early key-generation process that allowed cryptographic reconstruction. Three wallets from the same batch have now fallen in quick succession, which is hard to square with a one-off stroke of luck. A method that worked three times can presumably be turned on the remaining nine wallets and the $275+ million inside them.
None of this means governments can now break bitcoin. Nothing demonstrated in the case points to a compromise of ECDSA cryptography itself. The plausible explanations are prosaic – a physical copy of the keys recovered during searches, a weak password on an old wallet.dat file, or a flawed key generator from bitcoin’s earliest era. Modern hardware wallets and seed phrases face no demonstrated threat from anything shown so far.
Bitcoin entered July at a 21-month low near $57,950, pressed down by record ETF outflows of $4.51 billion in June alone, per 24/7 Wall St. The year opened above $93,000, June closed around $60,000, and the October 2025 peak of $126,000 now sits roughly 52% higher than spot. The Collins coins moved at the same time as several other large holders: a wallet linked to Tim Draper deposited 1,000 BTC worth $61.8 million to Coinbase, whale wallets pushed over $100 million to exchanges within 24 hours, and Riot Platforms has been liquidating reserves to fund its pivot toward AI infrastructure.
Against that, the actual volumes involved are small. Glassnode data shows that inflows from government wallets rarely exceed 0.1% of daily bitcoin volume, and 500 BTC is a rounding error against tens of billions in daily turnover. Even Germany’s $2.89 billion liquidation in 2024 was absorbed without structural damage. There is also a counter-signal in the data: large holders accumulated more than 270,000 BTC, about $16.7 billion, over two weeks despite weak US spot demand – a pattern CoinDesk notes has historically appeared near cycle bottoms. What hits the market in cases like this is mostly the headline itself – 500 BTC barely registers in the order book.
Ireland now inherits a policy dilemma with a well-documented precedent. Between June 19 and July 12, 2024, the German government sold 49,858 BTC for about $2.89 billion at an average price of $57,900, and prices dropped 15% during the selloff. The decision left nearly $3.6 billion in unrealized gains on the table at last year’s peak. The United States took the opposite path, holding 198,022 BTC worth over $24 billion in a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve with no plans to sell. Bitcoin recently traded less than $3,000 above Germany’s exit price, and at $60-62K the Berlin “mistake” looks far smaller than it did at $125K. That correction has reopened the sell-or-hold debate just as Dublin enters it with a potential 6,000 BTC.
A full recovery would make the Collins case the largest asset seizure in CAB’s history. The wider question it opens concerns the estimated 3-4 million BTC written off as permanently lost. That shrunken effective supply is a standing pillar of the bullish thesis. If law enforcement now holds a repeatable method for reopening early-era wallets, a portion of those coins theoretically returns to play, and anyone still holding bitcoin generated with 2010-2013 era software has a concrete reason to audit how their keys were created and move funds to modern storage. Traditional confiscations happen behind closed doors. Here analysts watched the coins move on the public ledger hours before any official statement appeared. Anyone tracking the nine remaining addresses will know about the next seizure before CAB says a word.
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