Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s crypto wallet recently received a mysterious donation in the form of 300 BTC. Many traders suspected it was a self-transfer, but crypto sleuth ZachXBT found the source to be ‘questionable.’
According to data from on-chain analysis platform Arkham Intelligence, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s crypto wallet received 300.001 BTC (BTC) on May 30. The donation came from an unknown wallet, before it was moved by Ulbricht to a different wallet a day later.
At current market prices, the 300 BTC donation is worth around $31.7 million. At press time, Bitcoin has gone up by 1.26% in the past 24 hours. The largest cryptocurrency by market cap has been trading hands at $105,666.
Initially, traders suspected the BTC donation was actually a self-transfer from the Silk Road founder’s own funds. This theory came from social media users who speculated that Ulbricht still had funds hidden away from his Silk Road days before he was sentenced to imprisonment.
However, on-chain investigator ZachXBT believed the BTC transfer was unlikely to come from Ulbricht himself.
“It likely doesn’t appear to be a self donation as people were claiming though it comes from a questionable sources due to the flagged address,” said ZachXBT in his post.
ZachXBT was able to track the funds’ origin back to a suspicious centralized Bitcoin mixing service called Jambler. He stated that Jambler was an odd choice, considering most traders tend to use the more widely used decentralized privacy tools like Wasabi or Samourai. Meanwhile, he said very few entities regularly use Jambler for large funds.
Not only that, the blockchain investigator also discovered that it was likely the 300 BTC originated from two dormant addresses. One address was created in 2014, while the other wallet was active back in 2019. However, the second wallet was previously flagged as suspicious by compliance tools.
Moreover, ZachXBT found that the two wallets had previously deposited large amounts of crypto into Jambler sometime between April and May. The on-chain investigator noted that the deposits match the timing of the donation sent to Ulbricht’s wallet.
Ever since he was released from prison thanks to a pardon from President Trump last January, the Silk Road founder has been trying to auction some of his personal belongings. So far, he has raised more than $1.8 million worth of BTC from the sales, garnering support from the crypto community.
Most recently, Tron (TRX) founder Justin Sun gifted Ulbricht the iconic banana and duct tape artwork dubbed the “Comedian” on May 30. Sun previously purchased the art installation from Sotheby’s in an auction at a final bid of $6.2 million.
