Golden Finance reports that according to the latest report released by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, unexpectedly received a Bitcoin donation worth approximately 31 million US dollars earlier this month, amounting to as many as 300 coins. After in-depth on-chain data analysis, this donation is suspected to be related to the Alphabay market-related wallet, which was once notorious in the dark web.
In the process of tracking the flow of this fund, Chainalysis found that donors used a variety of mixed services in an attempt to hide transaction traces to the greatest extent. This complex operation method makes it extremely difficult to trace the source of funds. However, by analyzing the flow pattern of funds, the usage characteristics of hybrid services, and the historical transaction records of related wallet addresses, researchers speculate that this fund is highly likely to have originated from an early supplier of Alphabay. The well-known blockchain detective ZachXBT was also involved in this fund traceability analysis. He confirmed that this fund did not come from Silk Road, but judging from the transaction model, the possibility that it was involved in illegal sources was extremely high.
Looking back at the history of the dark Web, Alphabay, as an important successor of Silk Road, was active in the dark Web field from 2014 to 2017. Similar to Silk Road, Alphabay also takes advantage of the anonymity of cryptocurrencies to build a huge illegal trading network, covering the trading of various illegal goods and services such as illegal drugs, toxic chemicals, stolen or fraudulent identity documents, counterfeits and malware. According to relevant statistics, the daily transaction volume of Alphabay was approximately 600,000 to 800,000 US dollars, which was twice the scale of Silk Road at that time. In the “Operation Bayonet” operation in 2017, Alphabay was jointly shut down by law enforcement agencies from multiple countries. Its operator was arrested and the servers related to the website were seized.
It is worth noting that Ross Ulbricht’s identity background has also undergone significant changes recently. In January this year, President Trump signed a comprehensive amnesty order for Ulbricht. Prior to this, Ulbricht was convicted of multiple charges including distributing drugs, participating in ongoing criminal activities, conspiring to carry out computer hacking attacks, conspiring to forge identities and money laundering for operating the Silk Road dark web marketplace, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. During its operation, Silk Road had more than one million registered users and a wide variety of goods, covering drugs, firearms and ammunition, counterfeit money, fake documents, human organs, stolen credit card information, etc. It even provided killer services and became a gathering place for criminals at that time. In 2013, Ulbricht was arrested by FBI agents while surfing the Internet in the library, and subsequently Silk Road was closed.
This time, Ulbricht received a large donation of Bitcoin, which is suspected to be related to Alphabay, triggering widespread speculation from all walks of life. On the one hand, some people think that this might be a form of support or gratitude expressed by the groups that once benefited from the model constructed by Ulbricht in the dark web ecosystem. On the other hand, there are also views suggesting that the injection of this fund might indicate that the dark web forces are attempting to take advantage of Ulbricht’s current pardoned status to re-establish the dark web trading ecosystem. At present, Ulbricht has not made a public response to this donation. Whether he will explain the use of the funds in the future and whether this donation will trigger new legal disputes remain to be seen. With the continuous development of cryptocurrencies on a global scale, the issue of their association with illegal activities such as the dark web has once again drawn high attention from regulatory authorities and all sectors of society.
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