“The Casascius coins were designed as offline cold storage with embedded private keys, but the project was shut down in 2013 due to regulatory pressure from FinCEN.”, — write: www.coindesk.com
The coins had been untouched since 2011 and 2012, when bitcoin was trading for less than $15 versus today’s price just shy of $90,000. The movement was confirmed by a blockchain explorer tracking the addresses.
Casascius coins are physical collectibles containing embedded private keys, made by Utah-based entrepreneur Mike Caldwell beginning in 2011. The coins, issued in denominations ranging from 1 to 1,000 BTC, were designed as offline cold storage.
Each coin comes with a tamper-evident holographic seal to protect the key underneath. Caldwell stopped producing pre-funded coins in late 2013 after the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) labeled him an unregistered money transmitter.
That regulatory pressure effectively ended the Casascius project, leaving around 90,000 coins in circulation, most holding small amounts of BTC. A handful, just six coins and 16 bars, were minted with 1,000 BTC.
It’s unclear whether the recent transfers were sales, internal reorganizations or simply precautionary moves to preserve access. The transfers could be linked to degrading physical components.
In a similar case earlier this year, a user on Bitcointalk claiming to be the owner of a 100 BTC Casascius bar reported difficulties importing the key into modern wallets after peeling the hologram. He eventually moved the funds, now worth about $9 million, to hardware storage.
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence’s Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025, with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch, the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B, while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
View Full Report
Alchemy co-founder and president Joe Lau said stablecoin adoption is exploding as banks, fintechs and payment platforms push beyond the USDT/USDC exchange era.
- Stablecoin usage is quickly broadening from crypto-native exchanges into payments, payroll and treasury as companies chase 24/7, digital-native settlement, according to Alchemy Co-founder and President Joe Lau.
- Banks are pushing tokenized deposits as a regulated, bank-native alternative that delivers stablecoin-like benefits for institutional clients.
- The endgame is a two-track system — stablecoins for open, two-party settlement; deposit tokens for bank ecosystems, until scale forces convergence and competition, Lau said.
Read full story