Crypto Seizure in Italy: Now the State Wants the Private Keys Too

by Fulvio Sarzana di S. Ippolito, Attorney, Sarzana & Partners Law Firm

Legislative Decree 186/2026 tells the public prosecutor where to send the cryptocurrencies he seizes. It does not yet tell him how.

In short. Legislative Decree 186/2026, in force from 31 October, changes crypto seizure in Italy: the judge must obtain the coins and, where possible, the private cryptographic keys, and send them to the Single Justice Fund. The judge can order an early sale, and a person who is acquitted gets back a sum of money with interest, not the bitcoin. The rules for safekeeping the keys are still missing: a decree of the Prime Minister will set them.

Thirty seconds from a phone, and the wallet is empty. That is all it takes for whoever holds the private key to drain a bitcoin account, even while the financial police are searching the house.

This is why crypto seizures, so far, have almost always ended up in a press release and nothing else. There is no counter at which to serve the order. There is no account to freeze. There is a string of characters, and either you have it or you do not.

Legislative Decree no. 186 of 25 September 2026, published in the Official Gazette on 16 October and in force from the 31st, tries to close the gap. It transposes a 2024 EU directive on asset recovery and touches many things, from confiscation of equivalent value to straw owners. The part that matters here is a different one.

When a judge orders a crypto seizure, the judge must now obtain the coins and, where possible, the means to access them. The decree calls them by their name: private cryptographic keys.

The destination is the Single Justice Fund (Fondo unico giustizia), the same container where money and assets seized in criminal trials have ended up for years, and which from the end of October also hosts a service dedicated to digital wallets.

The nature of the crypto seizure changes. Before, it was a ban: those funds must not be touched. Now it is a transfer. In Brussels they call it effective dispossession, which in plain language means the asset must really leave the hands of whoever holds it.

And when that is not possible? The decree gets by with an elastic formula: any other procedure that ensures the authority exclusive custody and control. Make do, in essence. Which is what prosecutors and the judicial police have been doing for years anyway, except that now it is written in a statute.

The issuer’s mailbox

The order must be notified to two parties: whoever issued the crypto-assets and whoever the person subject to the seizure has appointed to hold them, when they can be identified.

If the coins sit on an exchange, this works, because the exchange receives the order and freezes the account.

On the issuer, though, there is more than one doubt about the wording.

Bitcoin has no issuer. Nobody created it in a legal sense, nobody administers it, there is no company with a registered office and a certified email address. The rule makes sense for stablecoins and for tokens born from an identifiable party. For the cryptocurrency that gives its name to the whole subject, it does not.

Then comes the hardest scenario, the private wallet: a USB stick in a drawer, or twelve words learned by heart and never written down anywhere. There is nobody to notify there. Either the key turns up in the search, or the suspect cooperates. And since handing over the private key means handing over the whole estate, it seems unlikely to happen in the vast majority of cases.

Crypto seizure: who loses if the price moves

An apartment seized in January is worth roughly the same in December. Ten bitcoin can halve in six weeks, or double, and a criminal trial lasts years.

The decree answers indirectly, with early sale. If the assets cannot be preserved without deterioration or without disproportionate costs, the judge orders their sale. The person concerned can ask to be heard, but has fifteen days and no more.

They can appeal, but the appeal does not suspend the sale.

Once the asset is sold, the seizure moves to the sum collected.

Applied to bitcoin, the rule reads like this: the State can liquidate it while the trial is under way and keep the euros. The Treasury is protected from crashes, which is understandable. And if confiscation does not come, in prevention proceedings the proceeds go back to the person concerned with interest.

Interest. Not the value those coins would have today.

A person who is acquitted gets back a sum of money, not their bitcoin. If the price has gone up in the meantime, too bad.

In 2014 the US government auctioned almost 30,000 bitcoin seized from Silk Road, at about 630 dollars each. The buyer made the deal of the century. The US Treasury, a little less so.

The rest, for anyone with assets

A couple of lines on what the decree changes outside the crypto world, because it affects many more people.

Confiscation of equivalent value extends to the instruments of the offence: if the object has disappeared, the judge takes assets of the same value, even when held in a straw owner’s name, calibrating the amount on the seriousness of the offence and the convicted person’s economic conditions.

Then there is the third party. When the convicted person has nothing equivalent left, what he transferred to someone unconnected with the offence can be targeted. It is not enough that the asset changed hands: it must be shown that the recipient knew, at that moment, what the transfer was for.

The most important piece is missing

The service at the Single Justice Fund exists. The rules to make it work do not.

How the private keys are physically stored, with which security systems, with which infrastructure requirements, in how much time and under what conditions they can be sold: all deferred to a decree of the Prime Minister, on a proposal from the Ministries of Economy and Justice, in agreement with the Interior and after hearing the National Cybersecurity Agency. Four administrations plus an agency. On timing, better not to make predictions.

A public prosecutor who seizes bitcoin today therefore knows where to send it in theory and does not know how.

The gap, as always in Italy, will probably be filled by the practices of the offices on crypto seizure. On the topic, see also the firm’s pieces on computer seizure and cryptocurrencies and on the legal aspects of bitcoin (both in Italian).

Frequently asked questions on crypto seizure in Italy

A first version of this article was published on 20 October 2026 on Fulvio Sarzana’s blog at Il Sole 24 Ore (in Italian).