Clifton Collins: $41.5M of the Lost 'Fishing Rod' Bitcoin Just Moved to Coinbase Prime

At 14:16 UTC on Tuesday 20 October 2026, a bitcoin wallet that had not moved since a winter evening in January 2016 sent its entire balance, 500 bitcoin, to a new address. Within the hour the coins had been cut into 10-bitcoin pieces and, according to the trackers Lookonchain and Arkham Intelligence, sent on to Coinbase Prime, the arm of the American exchange Coinbase that serves institutions. Lookonchain, which follows large crypto transfers and posts them on X, valued the batch at $41.52 million.

The wallet is one of 12 linked to Clifton Collins, a former beekeeper from Crumlin in Dublin who grew cannabis in rented houses for more than a decade and was jailed for five years after his arrest in 2017. He bought about 6,000 bitcoin in 2011 and 2012, when a coin cost around $5. At the price Lookonchain used on 20 October, roughly $83,040 a coin, the whole stash would be worth about $498 million. For years nearly all of it was thought to be out of anyone's reach, because the codes that unlock it were last seen in a fishing rod case in Connemara.

That is no longer true. The October transfer was the fifth time this year that one of Collins's 500-bitcoin wallets has emptied. Ireland's Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) has announced three seizures of 500 bitcoin this year, 1,500 in all, which Irish media have tied to Collins. It has said nothing in public about the other two moves, on 28 August and 20 October. Seven wallets, holding 3,500 bitcoin, have not moved since 2016.

The beekeeper who bought bitcoin at $5

Collins worked as a security guard and then as a beekeeper, winning awards for his honey, according to The Guardian. From late 2005, gardaí believe, he grew cannabis full time in rented houses in Galway, Meath and Longford and sold the crop to dealers in Dublin. The Irish Times reported that the Galway house held more than 500 plants, and that each 16-week crop yielded about 4 kilos, sold for about €28,000. He put the profits into bitcoin in late 2011 and early 2012. Arkham puts the value of the 6,000 coins at that time at about $30,000.

His luck ran out at about 2.30am one night in February 2017, when gardaí on patrol on the Military Road near the Sally Gap, in the Wicklow Mountains, searched his Lexus 4x4 and found about €2,000 worth of cannabis. Gardaí from Clifden then searched his rented house at Farnaught, Cornamona, County Galway, and found the grow house. He was charged at Bray District Court with offences under the Misuse of Drugs Act and was later jailed for five years.

The keys in the fishing rod case

A bitcoin wallet is an entry on bitcoin's public ledger, a record anyone can read, much like a company's share register. What makes the coins spendable is the private key, a long string of characters that works as the combination to a safe and the owner's signature at once. Whoever holds the key can move the coins. Without it, nobody can. It works like a bearer bond: the paper is the money. Lose the paper and the coins are gone, because there is no bank to call and no password to reset.

The ledger shows that on the evening of 23 January 2016, within about two hours, 12 new wallets each received exactly 500 bitcoin. In early 2017, according to The Guardian and The Irish Times, Collins put the codes for all 12 on a single A4 sheet and hid it in the aluminium cap of a fishing rod case at the Cornamona house.

Then he went to prison. There was a break-in at the house, and the landlord had it cleared, sending Collins's belongings to the dump. Workers there told gardaí they remembered seeing fishing gear, The Guardian reported, but waste from the dump was shipped to Germany and China to be burned. The case was never found. Collins told gardaí he accepted the loss as "punishment for his own stupidity", and gardaí believed he had genuinely lost the codes.

A fortune the State owned but could not touch

CAB is the Irish state agency that takes criminals' money and property through the civil courts. In July 2019 it obtained a temporary freezing order over the bitcoin under the Proceeds of Crime Act. In February 2020 Mr Justice Alex Owens of the High Court made the freeze permanent, accepting that the coins were proceeds of crime. Collins did not contest it. At about €52 million, RTÉ reported, it was the largest single asset CAB had seized since it began operating in 1996. The plan was to hold it for about seven years, then pass it to the Department of Finance for the State's central fund.

Collins handed over what he could. In late 2020 he surrendered about €1.2 million in assets, including about €1 million in bitcoin whose codes he still had, a two-seater gyroplane, a camper van and a fishing boat, The Irish Times reported. A later CAB annual report counted 89 bitcoin among them.

The 6,000 coins stayed frozen in an odd sense: legally the State's, in practice nobody's. Justice Minister Jim O'Callaghan confirmed in a parliamentary reply to Green Party leader Roderic O'Gorman that the wallets were inaccessible and could not be sold. The Irish Examiner reported that reply on 24 March 2026.

Five wallets in seven months

The same day, An Garda Síochána, Ireland's police, announced that CAB, working with Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, had "gained access to and seized a cryptocurrency wallet containing 500 bitcoins", worth about €30 million. Europol had hosted meetings at its headquarters in The Hague and supplied what gardaí called "decryption resources". The Irish Times identified the wallet as one of Collins's 12.

More followed. On 19 May a second wallet emptied and CAB said it had seized another 500 bitcoin. Arkham data showed those coins going to Wintermute, a crypto trading firm, The Block reported. On 2 July CAB announced a third seizure, worth about €27 million, taking its total to 1,500 bitcoin. Lookonchain reported those coins going to Coinbase Prime. On 28 August a fourth wallet sent 500 bitcoin, valued by Lookonchain at $39.56 million, to Coinbase Prime, with no statement from CAB. Then came 20 October.

The ledger shows each move followed the same routine. The full 500 coins went to a fresh holding address, which split them into 10-bitcoin pieces within an hour. The July, August and October batches all passed through the very same holding address. Whoever controls it received the July coins, moved on the day CAB announced its third seizure, and the October coins.

How the wallets were opened has never been explained. The Garda statement credited Europol's decryption help and said nothing more. Arkham, writing in March, concluded that the police had somehow found the keys, while noting other theories: that Collins kept a copy of the codes, or that whoever broke into the house took them. Cryptopolitan, a crypto news site, raised the possibility of a flaw in the software that generated the keys. None has been confirmed.

Who moved the 500 bitcoin

The answer is not on the record. Neither CAB nor Europol has made any public statement about the 20 October transfer. Arkham believes law enforcement was behind it, Cryptopolitan reported, and the shared route with the July batch points the same way.

Coinbase Prime fits that picture but does not prove it. It is Coinbase's service for funds, companies and governments, combining custody, the safekeeping of assets, with large-scale trading, much like the prime-brokerage desk of an investment bank. In 2024 the US Marshals Service, which manages assets seized by the American government, hired Coinbase Prime to hold and sell its larger crypto holdings. In his parliamentary reply, O'Callaghan said that since 2020 CAB has sold seized crypto through a regulated exchange, its preferred method, and that the exchange does not reveal who buys.

A deposit is not a sale. Coins sent to Coinbase Prime may be sold, or simply held in custody. Neither the Irish authorities nor Coinbase has said which happened.