Ross Ulbricht, the former founder of the now-defunct drug trafficking site Silk Road, recently received an anonymous donation of 300 Bitcoins, worth around $31 million, according to reporting from WIRED. Following days of speculation, crypto investigation firm Chainalysis believes the donation came from someone associated with the now-defunct website known as AlphaBay, a platform that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) previously called “the largest marketplace on the Darknet.”
“Chainalysis has reasonable grounds to suspect the funds originated in AlphaBay,” a company spokesperson told Fortune.
The news was first reported by WIRED. Chainalysis director of investigations Phil Larratt told that outlet that the number of Bitcoins “suggest they came from someone who was possibly a vendor on AlphaBay back in the early days.”
Ulbricht did not immediately respond to a request for comment made through the Free Ross campaign that advocated for his pardon.
AlphaBay, similar to Ulbricht’s Silk Road, was an online marketplace that dealt in illegal goods and services like drugs and stolen data. It operated between 2014 to 2017, before resurfacing again from 2021 to 2023. While the Silk Road is known as one of the first drug trafficking sites, AlphaBay is known as one of the largest, with 25 times more listings than the Silk Road, according to the FBI. AlphaBay was taken offline in 2017 after a global law enforcement operation seized the site’s servers and arrested its creator, Alexander Cazes.
It remains unclear who sent the donation to Ulbricht. It is also unclear why someone would give so much cryptocurrency to Ulbricht. Taylor Monahan, a security researcher at crypto firm MetaMask, told WIRED that people make donations for a number of reasons. “People donate when they’re deeply inspired by someone and/or grateful and/or have some sort of remorse for the situation,” Monahan said.
Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI in 2013 and sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted of drug trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering. On Jan. 21, one day after his inauguration, Trump announced that he had pardoned Ulbricht. Ulbricht spent nearly 11 years in prison.
“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” Trump said on Truth Social in January.
