Is there a cryptographic vault with the US Marshals Service that has been seized? According to a new inspection, not so much
The lack of established procedures and processes relating to the administration of confiscated crypto assets, particularly the usage of stock sheets, was revealed during the OIG’s examination.
The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) performed an exhaustive assessment of the cryptocurrency seized by the United States Marshals Service (USMS), highlighting the federal agency’s urgent need to overhaul its present crypto planning and governance processes.
The USMS implemented acceptable measures over its connectivity and backup, according to the OIG’s assessment of the confiscated cryptocurrency. Due to the incapacity of the previous system, Consolidated Asset Tracking System (CATS), to handle digital currencies regularly, the organization was discovered to be using excel to keep stock levels.
The lack of established procedures and processes relating to the handling of confiscated digital currencies, particularly the usage of stock sheets, was revealed by the OIG’s audit, which added:
“Current USMS confiscated cryptocurrency governance mechanisms are insufficient, nonexistent, or contradictory in some cases regarding asset storage, measurement, evaluation, and liquidation.”
With the expertise of the USMS’s intention to delegate the governance of seized digital currencies, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General issued seven suggestions to help streamline the process, beginning with the implementation of a property management platform “that logs edit history to avoid bogus modification of the inventory items.”
The OIG also suggested that new standards be established for the proper security and management of the sheets that are used to track cryptographic interceptions. This impacts social information from excel to the CATS inventories.
Other significant proposals include adding enough decimal points to guarantee partial precision, establishing regulations to accommodate blockchain splits, and gaining physical control over the assets confiscated by the USMS, “particularly necessary USMS wallet keys.”
The report also indicated that USMS agreed with all seven suggestions and that the case will be concluded once proof of their successful integration is provided.
According to CoinShares’ weekly Digital Asset Fund Inflow and outflow report, technology platform items worth $101.5 million were offloaded in anticipation of “hawkish financial regulation,” declaring:
“What has driven Bitcoin into a ‘crypto freeze’ over the previous six months can mostly be described as a direct consequence of the US Federal Reserve’s growing hawkish language.”
The net assets under administration for Ether (ETH) funds plummeted from a high of $23 billion in November 2021 to $8.7 billion as of June 10, 2022, according to the study.
