Darknet website sends Ross Ulbricht 300 Bitcoins as a gift
Last Updated on 9 June 2025 by CryptoTips.eu
Earlier this year, Ross Ulbricht, the notorious founder of Silk Road and the first real Bitcoin Whale, was released from prison. Ross’ Bitcoin stash was seized by US authorities upon his arrest in 2013, who have since sold off most of it, but many have wondered where the rest of the money is.
Last week, an anonymous donor suddenly sent Ross 300 Bitcoins, worth $31 million. Where did the money come from?
Alphabay
For those who don’t know him, let’s explain it one more time: Ulbricht is a 41-year-old programmer who founded the darknet marketplace Silk Road in 2011. There you could buy almost all drugs and other illegal materials in the farthest corners of the internet.
Payments were made in Bitcoin. The FBI shut down Silk Road (named after the historical trade route between Asia and Europe) and arrested Ulbricht in 2013. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Since he was one of the first to create a use case for Bitcoin, he still garners a lot of respect in the crypto world.
Ulbricht had so many Bitcoins at the time of his arrest that he would have become a billionaire many times over if the digital money had not been seized. However, when he was released from prison this year, he had nothing left.
All that is now changing because an anonymous donor sent Ulbricht 300 Bitcoins, worth 31 million dollars.
Where did that money come from today? Well, the crypto research company Chainalysis investigated and traced the origin. The digital coins were a proceeds from Alphabay, an illegal website on the darknet that was founded shortly after Ulbricht’s arrest. According to the FBT, AlphaBay grew 10 times larger than Silk Road itself until that site was also shut down in 2017
But most notably, AlphaBay founder Alexandre Cazes died in mysterious circumstances in a Bangkok prison shortly after his arrest. The site’s administrator however, who went by the internet handle Desnake, is still at large. Rumor on social media ihas it that this was simply a “thank you” for a good idea (of setting up an illegal marketplace), sent by Desnake who has managed to stay out of jail (at least so far).
