Another 500 BTC linked to Clifton Collins, the Irish cannabis grower whose bitcoin keys were thought lost in 2017, moved on 20 October to Coinbase Prime. The transfer was worth about $41 million. Blockchain tracker Lookonchain flagged the deposit, and Arkham Intelligence, which tagged the sending wallet as Collins-linked, counted it as the fifth such move this year. No Irish agency has said it made the move. If the labels are right, this is the fifth 500 BTC batch to leave the Clifton Collins bitcoin wallets in 2026, after more than ten years of silence.
Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) has officially announced three seizures of 500 bitcoin this year, in March, May and July. It has said nothing about a fourth batch that moved on 28 August, or about Tuesday’s transfer. So for the last two, the only evidence is on-chain: the coins left wallets that analytics firms attribute to Collins and went to an institutional Coinbase service.
Arkham also said law enforcement was likely behind the transfer, according to Cryptopolitan. That is an inference from the pattern, not a statement from CAB or the Gardaí. A deposit to Coinbase Prime does not show that anything was sold either.
Who is Clifton Collins, and why his bitcoin was called lost
The story behind the wallets was first told in February 2020 by The Irish Times and The Guardian, and retold by The Register and, this March, by The Block. Collins, a former award-winning beekeeper, grew and sold cannabis from around 2005. Between late 2011 and early 2012 he put about $30,000 of the proceeds into bitcoin, buying roughly 6,000 BTC when one coin cost a few dollars.
He split the coins into 12 wallets of 500 BTC each. The private keys were printed on a sheet of A4 paper, which he hid in the aluminium cap of a fishing rod case at a house he rented in County Galway.
He was arrested in 2017 and jailed for five years for drug offences. While he was inside, the landlord cleared the rented house, and the rod case with the printed keys is believed to have been thrown out with the rest of its contents. From then on, the 12 wallets were the textbook example of coins nobody could spend: the CAB could claim them as proceeds of crime, but without the keys no one could move them.
The Block reported that the CAB seized the bitcoin from Collins in 2020. Journal du Coin, the French outlet that covered Tuesday’s move in French, gives further details on that seizure and on what happened to the rod case, but Coindaro could not confirm them in any other source, so they are left out here.
The first three batches: what the Criminal Assets Bureau confirmed
The first wallet woke up on the morning of 24 March 2026. A wallet that Arkham labels “Clifton Collins: Lost Keys”, with no activity since January 2016, sent 500 BTC to a new address, after which the coins were spread across dozens of addresses and about $13.5 million reached Coinbase Prime, The Block reported. The batch was worth about $35 million at the time.
The same day, An Garda Síochána published a press release. It said the CAB, supported by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, had gained access to and seized “a cryptocurrency wallet containing 500 bitcoins, which are the proceeds of crime”, valued at about EUR 30 million. Europol hosted operational meetings in The Hague and provided decryption resources. The release named no one. The link to Collins came from The Irish Times, which reported that the wallet was one of his 12.
The second batch was announced on 19 May: another 500 BTC, about $38.7 million. The CAB again credited Europol with “highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources” and gave no further comment, according to The Block. Arkham data showed coins going to the market maker Wintermute. After that move, the Collins-tagged wallets still held about 5,000 BTC.
On Thursday 2 July the CAB announced a third seizure of 500 BTC, about EUR 27 million ($30.9 million), bringing its 2026 total to 1,500 BTC. Europol again provided “operational coordination, technical expertise and decryption support”, the bureau said, as reported by Cointelegraph. Lookonchain then reported a 500 BTC deposit to Coinbase Prime, which it valued at $30.85 million, as crypto.news relayed. Cointelegraph noted that the authorities had not confirmed the link to Collins: the CAB has never named the owner in any of its three statements.
28 August and 20 October: two moves with no official statement
On 28 August Lookonchain flagged another 500 BTC, worth about $39.56 million at the time, leaving a wallet tied to Collins for Coinbase Prime. crypto.news reported the alert that evening and found no statement from the CAB, the Gardaí or Europol. Coindaro has found none since.
The fifth batch surfaced on 20 October. Lookonchain posted that a wallet inactive for more than 10 years had deposited 500 BTC to Coinbase Prime; Arkham linked the wallet to Collins, noting it was first funded on 23 January 2016. Outlets that relayed the news, including Cryptopolitan, Crypto Economy and Coin-Turk, all rely on those two trackers. Coin-Turk’s headline presents the move as an Irish law enforcement action; the trackers’ data does not show who signed the transaction.
Reported values for the transfer range from $41.26 million to $41.52 million depending on the bitcoin price used. Coindaro rounds it to about $41 million. Bitcoin traded near $82,580 at 06:04 UTC on 21 October, which puts 500 BTC at about $41.3 million.
| Date (2026) | Amount | Value reported at the time | Where the coins went, as reported | Official statement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 March | 500 BTC | about $35M (EUR 30M per the Gardaí) | dozens of addresses, about $13.5M to Coinbase Prime | Yes, Garda/CAB press release |
| 19 May | 500 BTC | about $38.7M | Wintermute, per Arkham | Yes, CAB |
| 2 July | 500 BTC | about $30.9M (EUR 27M) | Coinbase Prime, per Lookonchain | Yes, CAB |
| 28 August (reported) | 500 BTC | about $39.56M | Coinbase Prime, per Lookonchain | None found |
| 20 October | 500 BTC | about $41M | Coinbase Prime, per Lookonchain and Arkham | None found |
Sources do not agree on every detail. Some outlets write that the March coins went to Coinbase Custody rather than to Coinbase Prime, and accounts of the May destination differ too. The table follows The Block, Cointelegraph and crypto.news, which published at the time of each move.
About 3,500 BTC of the Clifton Collins bitcoin have not moved
Five batches of 500 make 2,500 BTC, about 42% of the 6,000 coins Collins is said to have bought. If the 12-wallet account is accurate, seven wallets holding about 3,500 BTC have not moved. At the 06:04 UTC price on 21 October, that is about $289 million, close to the $288 million figure circulating in the press.
The pace has been fairly regular: March, May, July, August, October, so roughly one wallet every two months. At that rhythm the last seven would take until late 2027, an extrapolation Journal du Coin also makes. Nothing obliges whoever holds the keys to keep that schedule.
For comparison, Mt. Gox’s trustee still controls about 34,500 BTC after pushing its repayment deadline to 31 October 2027, and a UK court is weighing rival claims, Beijing’s among them, to 61,000 seized bitcoin.
What a Coinbase Prime deposit does and does not show
Coinbase Prime is the exchange’s service for institutions. It combines trading with custody, and the US government also uses it. A transfer into Prime therefore fits a sale, a move into professional custody, or preparation for a sale months later. Both crypto.news and Crypto Economy pointed out that a deposit on its own does not prove a sale.
No sale of any Collins coins has been announced. The CAB’s job is to take criminal assets and turn them into revenue for the Irish state, but the bureau has said that “the value of crypto assets can be difficult to realise”, as RTÉ recalled on 24 March. Coindaro found no sign that Ireland plans to hold the coins in some kind of reserve.
For readers who use the exchange, these transfers change nothing about how Coinbase works; our Coinbase review covers its custody and fees.
How did investigators get into wallets whose keys were thrown away?
Nobody has explained it officially. The Garda release mentions only Europol’s “technical expertise and decryption resources”, and the CAB’s later statements use similar words. The emphasis on decryption suggests investigators worked on some encrypted copy of the keys rather than the lost sheet of paper, but that is a reading of the wording, not a confirmed fact.
Journal du Coin lists two possibilities: Collins cooperated or kept a copy of his keys, or investigators broke an encrypted backup. Neither has been confirmed by the CAB, Europol or Collins.
A private key is the only thing that lets someone spend bitcoin from an address. Seizing a wallet in law means little until the key is in hand, which is why the 12 Collins wallets sat idle for years after the 2020 seizure. Europe is trying to make that kind of work easier across borders: the EU and eight states have just signed a Council of Europe treaty on seizing criminal crypto.
A separate 411 BTC wallet moved two days earlier
Some reports bundled the Collins transfer with other old wallets that woke up in October. One of them has no known link to Collins. On 18 October at 18:23 UTC, address 13Coop8xFbYj9JR9WyF5EqzGa9GiZmxs7C, whose coins had sat untouched since September 2013, sent 411.45 BTC (about $33.4 million, per Journal du Coin) to a single new address, as mempool.space shows. Journal du Coin reports that the address is among the 39,069 named in the “Noah Doe” lawsuit in New York, which seeks to treat old coins as abandoned property.
This is not the wallet in Coindaro’s 18 October report on a 2013 stash that swept 471 BTC to 15 new addresses. The amounts and the shape of the transactions differ: one output here, 15 there.
What to watch next
The first thing to watch is whether the CAB or Europol confirms the August and October transfers, as the bureau did for the first three. A statement would settle who controls the keys today. The second is whether the CAB says anything about selling the coins now at Coinbase Prime, or about where the money goes.
Then there are the seven wallets that have not moved. If the two-month rhythm holds, the next 500 BTC batch would be due around December. Arkham and Lookonchain will see it the moment it happens; whether Dublin says anything is another matter.