When Ross Ulbricht received a $31 million bitcoin donation last weekend from an unknown source, many observers saw it as more than a very nice welcome-home gift. Rumors swirled that the creator of the Silk Road, less than five months after receiving a pardon from Donald Trump that saved him from a lifetime in prison, was sending himself a trove of his stashed criminal proceeds from his days running the dark web’s first black market more than a decade prior.
Now cryptocurrency tracing investigators say they’ve arrived at a stranger explanation: The money wasn’t originally Ulbricht’s, and didn’t come from the Silk Road. Instead, they suspect it came from a different long-defunct dark web black market: AlphaBay.
The crypto tracing firm Chainalysis tells WIRED that, based on blockchain analysis, it has tied the origin of the 300 bitcoins sent to Ulbricht on Sunday to someone involved in AlphaBay, a dark web market that sold a wide variety of drugs and cybercriminal contraband from 2014 to 2017 and eventually grew to be 10 times the size of the Silk Road, according to the FBI.
Chainalysis says the funds appear to have emerged from AlphaBay around 2016 and 2017. Given the amount of the donation, Chainalysis suggests it might have come from someone who acted as a large-scale seller on the market. “We have reasonable grounds to suspect that these funds originated in AlphaBay,” says Phil Larratt, Chainalysis’s director of investigations and a former official at the UK’s National Crime Agency. “Looking at the amount, that would suggest they came from someone who was possibly a vendor on AlphaBay back in the early days.”
WIRED reached out to Ulbricht for comment about the donation’s origin via contacts at the Free Ross campaign that lobbied for his pardon, but didn’t immediately receive a response.
Prior to Chainalysis’s finding that the $31 million donation appears to have originated at AlphaBay, the independent crypto tracing investigator known as ZachXBT had already posted to his account on X his own findings that the money didn’t appear to have come from the Silk Road. ZachXBT found that, despite the donor’s use of multiple Bitcoin “mixers” that take in users’ coins and return others to obfuscate their trail on the blockchain, he was able to trace the funds to an address that had been flagged in Chainalysis’s software tool Reactor as tied to illicit activity. That analysis suggested that the money was a “legitimate donation but not legitimate funds,” ZachXBT wrote in a text message to WIRED.
ZachXBT also found that the same individual who controlled the funds had cashed out other cryptocurrency at an exchange in small, distributed quantities rather than in a single sum, suggesting he or she may have been trying to prevent them being seized or flagged—another sign that the money may have come from criminal origins. “Usage of multiple mixers, spreading out CEX deposits, etc,” ZachXBT writes to WIRED, using the term CEX to mean a centralized exchange, “that is done typically if you are trying to avoid getting illicit funds frozen.”
