ust before sunset on a chilly Spring day in 2019 armed German special agents broke down the door to the Frankfurt home of a 22-year-old hacker who the government has only identified as Coder420, the developer of a dark web exchange called Wall Street Market. At its peak, the enterprise was the largest of its kind, conducting about €50 million in sales between October 2016 and April 2019, selling everything from cocaine to credentials.
Over the past month, two other states have signed deals similar to Hesse’s, according to Bankhaus Scheich’s managing director of digital assets, Nils von Schoenaich-Carolath, 34, and other German states are currently exploring similar services, he says. As U.S.
had to personally, painstakingly, piece together a process by which her team could sell the bitcoin. Two years later she was called on again when her team grabbed the much larger 2,200 bitcoin booty from the Wall Street Market.Since her first, highly manual sale of bitcoin, digital-asset regulation had advanced, she says, “and you could see step by step that coins were becoming more and more actual financial instruments. They're not cars,” she says.
To clean the funds, Ringwald first had to make sure her colleagues and bosses at the state government were okay with writing an official letter in English for international companies on German state letterhead, something that’s normally frowned upon.