The UK Home Office is planning to sell around $7 billion of seized cryptocurrency to fill a budget gap.

BlockBeats News, July 20th. According to The Daily Telegraph of the UK, the Home Office is collaborating with the police to sell a batch of seized cryptocurrency to fill a budget shortfall. The total amount of cryptocurrency seized by the police is not yet clear, but in a raid in 2018, about 61,000 bitcoins were confiscated from a Ponzi scheme case. The current total value exceeds £5.4 billion (approximately $7 billion), a twentyfold increase from the time of seizure.

The Home Office plans to establish a "Cryptocurrency Storage and Realization Framework" to allow law enforcement agencies to securely store frozen digital assets and sell them. According to a tender notice issued by the UK government through the police's procurement company, BlueLight Commercial, on behalf of the Home Office, the government will also provide a contract to operate a centralized service responsible for holding and selling seized cryptocurrency. The contract is valued at up to $53.7 million and is set to last at least four years, but the proposal has not yet received acceptable bids. The time between the police seizing digital assets and liquidating these assets is usually lengthy. The tender notice states: "The average time between asset seizure and the end of legal proceedings (realization) is less than 1 year, and for more complex cases, it may take 3 to 4 years."