When Ross Ulbricht Last weekend, $31 million in Bitcoin donations were received from an unknown source, and many observers think it’s more than just a very good welcome family gift. Rumor has it that the creator of the Silk Road saved his life from his life less than five months after pardoned from Donald Trump, sending out a bunch of criminals he hid in from his days, the profit of his first black market in the first decade of the Dark Web.
Now, cryptocurrency tracking investigators say they have gotten an explanation from a stranger: The money is not Ulbridge’s, nor does it come from the Silk Road. Instead, they suspect it comes from Different Long-term re-point dark color – Internet black market: Alphabay.
Crypto-tracking firm chain analysis tells Wired that according to the blockchain analysis it will send 300 bitcoins to Ulbricht’s origins with those involved in Alphabay (a dark web market) that sold a variety of drug and cybercrime contraband from 2014 to 2017, eventually from 2017 to 2017 and eventually reached 10 times the Silk Road.
Chainalysis said the funds appeared to have emerged from Alphabay around 2016 and 2017. Given the amount of donations, Chainalysis shows that it may come from people in the market who act as a large seller. “We have reasonable reasons to suspect that the funds originated in Alphabay,” said Phil Larratt, director of investigative investigations at Chainalysis and a former official at the National Crime Agency. “Looking at the money, it shows that they come from people who might have been vendors on Alphabay in the early days.”
Wired commented on the origins of the donation by contacting Ulbricht in the Free Roth movement lobbying his pardon, but no response was received immediately.
Before conducting a chain analysis, it was found that the $31 million donation appeared to originate from Alphabay, an independent crypto-tracking investigator known as Zachxbt, had posted his own discovery on his account, and his own discovery did not appear to have come from the Silk Road. Zachxbt found that despite the donors using multiple bitcoin “mixers” that absorbed user coins and returned to the trails where others were confusing them on the blockchain, he was able to trace the funds back to addresses marked as illegal activity in the software tool reactor for chain analysis. The analysis shows that the money is a “legal donation, but not a legal donation,” Zachxbt wrote in a text message.
Zachxbt also found that the same person who controlled the funds traded other cryptocurrencies in a smaller distributed quantity rather than a single amount, suggesting that he or she may have been trying to prevent them from being seized or marked, another sign that the money could have come from the origins of the crime. Zachxbt uses the term “Cex” to mean “using multiple mixers, spreading CEX sediments, etc,” Zachxbt writes, “this is usually done if you want to avoid freezing illegal funds.”
