Last week, a transaction on a chain brought together 300 bitcoins (at $31 million today), a public donation address that Ross Ulbricht began publishing shortly after he gained his freedom. The huge scale of the transfer immediately rekindled the rumor of a decade-old that the founder of the Silk Road might have killed a secret war box before he was arrested in 2013. But the fresh blockchain forensic paints a more puzzling picture: the coin appears not from Ulbricht’s own past, but from Alphabay, the Silk Road eclipsed on the 2017 magnificent silk of 2017.
Where does 300 Bitcoin come from?
Chainalysis, a New York-based cryptocurrency tracking company, is backed by Operation Benite’s investigation backbone, has rebuild the coin’s lineage into a group of Alphabays, first for the first time between 2016 and 2017. Connect. “Looking at the money, it shows that they come from people who might have been vendors on Alphabay in the early days.”
The obvious Alphabay source deepens the conspiracy around Ulbricht, who walked freely in January after former U.S. President Donald Trump granted him all unconditional pardons nearly 11 years later. The wide-large command made Ulbricht a fixture on the Pro-Crypto Tour, eventually culminating in a keynote speech at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, where he called for “a radical culture of self-advocacy.”
Independent detective Zachxbt’s crowdsourcing investigation repeatedly confirmed the conclusions of chain analysis in real time before formally prosecuting. Despite the donor’s use of several mixed hops, he traced the funds back to an already red address in the chain analysis reactor and concluded that the gift represents “a legal donation, but not a legal fund.” He added: “If you want to avoid freezing illegal funds, use multiple mixers, spread CEX sediments, etc.”
Crucially, the trail passes through Jambler, a little-known centralized “white label” glass that promotes itself as an infrastructure provider that may become a mix operator, an experienced privacy advocate who often opt for the open source COINJOJOIN style protocol. Jambler’s own marketing commitment partner “off-the-shelf hybrid infrastructure” and possesses “removing the risk of aristocratic names,” highlights investigators’ suspicion that senders have suffered from the proceeds of money-laundering contraband, rather than mere political statements.
Founded by the late Alexandre Cazes, Alphabay, once an estimated $2 million in daily sales, was demolished in July 2017 when the FBI-led multinational company strikes grabbed its servers and was in parallel, parallel, secretly hijacked rival market Hansa in an action known as Bayonet. In the case of controversy, the crackdown left Cazes dead in a Bangkok prison cell. His lieutenant, the security administrator for “Desnake” and has never been identified, which has pushed at least one Alphabay advanced scroller (Administrator or vendor) to appreciate 40 times the price of Bitcoin into the Nine nine Figure field, and is now rewarding Ulbricht’s Pioneer-ecrpto of crerpto interpo in Crypto Contrepo Contrepo Contrecto Contrapo Contrapo Contrapo Contrapo Contrapo Contraband Commercecermerce.
Why do people who wrote scripts for their success in popular imaginations give them millions of people? Blockchain security researcher Taylor Monahan provides a reading of psychology: “People donate their donations and are deeply excited about it and/or regretful about the situation. Survivors’ inner gui is crazy.”
Chain analysis refuses to describe heuristic or proprietary clustering techniques that link donor wallets to Alphabay, citing on the ongoing investigation sensitivity. However, the company confirmed that it is sharing its findings with law enforcement partners in the United States and Europe. Whether these agencies can pierce the mixer fog and attach legal identities to the pseudo-believer remains uncertain; any suspect will have nearly eight years of history to perfect operational security and distance themselves from the current contaminated coins.
For Ulbricht, unexpected gains have their own complications. Under his pardon clause, he is no longer bound by compensation or forfeiture orders, but inflows associated with trafficking in narcotics could lead to a re-examination by financial crime regulators. Ulbricht has not publicly commented on the source of the donation, and representatives of the Ross movement have not responded to multiple requests for clarification.
At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $102,814.
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