last week the United States Department of Justice announced that it had recovered 3.6 billion BTC that had been stolen from the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange in 2016.

BTC was found to be in the possession of two peculiar people in New York city who were subsequently charged with laundering the stolen coins. The dark side of NFT's money laundering involves making the proceeds from illicit activities look legit using say a business that accepts lots of cash as payment. What's odd is that the couple who allegedly conspired to launder the stolen BTC put their personalities on full public display while simultaneously using sophisticated techniques to hide their BTC sales. What makes this even more odd is that the couple kept the private keys to their BTC stash on a cloud drive connected to the internet such as google drive.

This is eerily like the amateur error made by the

hackers behind the colonial pipeline attack last year who likewise put the private keys to the wallet holding their stolen BTC on google drive making it possible for us authorities to recover the funds.

Shortly after the ransom was paid the recovery of Bitfenix's BTC has consequently raised a lot of eyebrows in the crypto community especially.

Since the couple have not been charged with being behind the Bitfenix hack itself.

The bigger question is what will happen to the over 94,000 BTC that's currently being held by U.S authorities given that it rightfully belongs to Bitfinex. As many have pointed out the contentious relationship between U.S regulators and USDT issuer Tether means that Bitfinex may struggle to get it back since Bitfinex is effectively Tether's sister company

Others have pointed out that it's possible that U.S authorities will try to return the BTC directly to those

affected by the Bitfinex hack in 2016 though. It's unclear how exactly this would be coordinated without Bitfinex's help the third possibility is that U.S authorities will simply opt to auction off the recovered BTC to wealthy individual and institutional investors the same way they did with BTC seized in past.