Bitcoin untouched for over a decade, linked to the darknet marketplace Silk Road, has been transferred to an unknown wallet. The platform operated in the early 2010s; its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. In early 2025, he received a pardon from U.S. President Donald Trump and was released. The Bitcoin remained untouched throughout his entire sentence and has appreciated nearly 1,000 times in value over the years.
The transfer operation involved approximately 312 separate transactions from various addresses, totaling $3.1 million, according to the analytics platform Arkham. The transactions occurred on the night of December 10 from a cluster of addresses linked to the Silk Road marketplace. The $3.1 million volume is only a portion of the total coins in the cluster—as of December 10, another $38.5 million remains stored there.
Silk Road was the first internet marketplace where anonymous trading of prohibited goods took place, from drugs to counterfeit documents. Access to the platform, located on the darknet, required the anonymous Tor network, and Bitcoin was used as the payment method.
In October 2013, Silk Road was shut down with the joint participation of FBI agents, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, also known by the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested and charged with drug trafficking, money laundering, and running a criminal enterprise. In February 2015, he was sentenced to two life sentences plus an additional 40 years in prison.
Many of the 312 addresses last recorded transactional activity in 2013, when the price of Bitcoin was around $100, according to the Blockchain.com explorer. The current price of Bitcoin is around $92.3 thousand, implying an increase in the value of the assets by more than 900 times. Thus, the balances of these addresses at that time were just a few dollars or even cents.
In early 2025, Ulbricht received a pardon from Donald Trump and was released. Earlier, experts had suggested that around 400 bitcoins might be preserved in Ulbricht's personal wallets. During Silk Road's operation, this amount was considered insignificant, but since then, the value of these coins has increased approximately a thousandfold. The discovered wallets from this group remain inactive.
Who exactly is behind the new transfers is unknown. It is also unclear whether Ulbricht has any connection to them.
Following Ulbricht's pardon in January 2025, Coinbase's Director of Product, Conor Grogan, stated that he had discovered approximately 430 bitcoins across dozens of wallets, presumably linked to or owned by Ross Ulbricht.
According to Grogan, the bitcoins he discovered were not confiscated by law enforcement during the shutdown of Silk Road and remained untouched throughout Ulbricht's prison term or longer (up to 13 years). In his opinion, the wallets contained leftover funds that were worth almost nothing at the time.
After reports emerged about Bitcoin transfers from the 312 addresses, Grogan again brought up the topic in response to a post by an anonymous user, Plasma Foundation '0xG00gly', on the social network X, who had drawn attention to the transactions.
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