Sovereign + trustee distribution window (July 2024)

July 2024 was the most concentrated month of dormant-coin distribution in Bitcoin's history. Two unrelated sequences overlapped: the German BKA was finishing its sale of the 49,857 BTC Movie2K seizure (a multi-month operation that had started in March), and the Mt. Gox trustee began distributing approximately 140,000 BTC to creditors after a decade of legal proceedings.

Both sequences peaked on the same day: July 23, 2024, with 59.6 million BTC·days destroyed. On-chain attribution between the two flows is ambiguous at the per-transaction level — different forensics firms gave slightly different breakdowns — but the aggregate signal was unmistakable: deposit-era Mt. Gox cold wallets from 2011-2014 and seized-asset BKA wallets from 2020 were moving in parallel through the same multi-week window.

The market read this as bearish in real time. In hindsight, both flows were absorbed without major price impact, in part because the distributions were known in advance and front-run via futures positioning. The CDD print is the cleanest historical example of "everybody knew it was coming, the chain proved it when it arrived."