Key takeaways:
- The infamous dark-web marketplace Silk Road’s founder last week received $31 million worth of Bitcoin as a donation.
- The wallet that donated the BTC is now found to be linked to the defunct illegal marketplace AlphaBay.
- The link was founded by the investigation firm Chainalysis, with the help of ZachXBT and Lookonchain.
- Ross Ulbricht has not yet responded to the questions regarding the transaction that made him extremely rich.
The recent donation that made Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht extremely rich is now found to have been sent by a crypto wallet tied to the defunct dark web marketplace Alphabay. The fund flow was traced by the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
Phil Larratt, the director of investigations at Chainalysis, stated that they had reasonable grounds to suspect that the funds originated in AlphaBay. He noted that, considering the amount, it would suggest that the funds had possibly come from someone who had been a vendor on AlphaBay in its early days.
Ulbricht received 31 million dollars in Bitcoin on 31st May 2025, two days after he delivered a keynote speech at the closing ceremony of Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas. Due to the anonymity behind the person who donated the BTC, various theories surfaced on the internet, including the allegation that the funds came from Ulbricht’s own secret wallet that stashed Bitcoin before his imprisonment.
Investigating the Fund Flow into Ulbricht’s Wallet
The analytics firm Lookonchain was the first to notice the fund flow into Ulbricht’s wallet. He received a total of 300 coins in a single transaction, valued at $31 million at the current market price. It was evident that Ulbricht was in need of money, as exhibited in the auction of his personal belongings, including his pre-arrest backpack and prison ID card.
When various online users accused that the coins he received were from Silk Road, the independent blockchain investigator ZachXBT found that the transaction had no connection with the Silk Road wallets, but he noted a suspicious pattern in the fund movement.
Instead of executing a direct transaction, the coins sent to Ulbricht’s wallet arrived through multiple mixing services, intending to avoid detection. According to ZachXBT, the donation appears to come from a sketchy centralized mixing service named Jambler. Chainalysis further enhanced the investigation and identified the wallet as an AlphaBay-linked address.
About AlphaBay
AlphaBay was once considered one of the largest Darknet marketplaces, where thousands of users bought and sold drugs, weapons, hacking tools, and fake identities. Ran within a Tor-based onion website, the marketplace used Bitcoin as its primary transaction tool.
Between 2016 and 2017, the FBI conducted various investigations on AlphaBay, resulting in the arrest of the site’s creator and administrator, Alexandre Cazes, a Canadian citizen living in Thailand, and the seizure of its multiple servers.
Soon after the arrest, FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe stated during a press conference that it had been a landmark operation. He explained that AlphaBay had multiple servers in different countries, hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency, and a Darknet drug network that had spanned the globe.
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About Ross Ulbricht
Years before the AlphaBay incident, Ross Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI in 2013 for creating and running a dark-web-based marketplace named Silk Road. Following a series of investigations and hearings, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015, mainly for facilitating $200 million worth of illicit online trade using Bitcoin.
According to reports, a total of 173,991 Bitcoins were seized from him and later acquired by the U.S. government. Around 9 years later, Donald Trump, in an election campaign, stated that he would release Ulbricht when he gets elected.
On January 22nd, 2025, hours after his presidency, Trump granted a full, unconditional pardon to Ross Ulbricht, leading to his release. The infamous founder of the dark web marketplace has now become a public celebrity who made his first public appearance at the 2025 Bitcoin conference.