In brief
- Bitcoin wallets labeled as belonging to Silk Road moved around $3 million in BTC on Tuesday.
- The wallets are allegedly connected to Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht.
- Ulbricht was pardoned by President Trump in January after serving more than a decade in prison.
A cluster of wallets labeled with connections to shuttered dark web marketplace Silk Road—and allegedly tied to pardoned platform creator Ross Ulbricht—were active for the first time in at least five years on Tuesday, sending millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin to a fresh wallet address.
Labeled by blockchain intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence, the wallets once held as much as 442,000 BTC in 2012. Now they are down to around 416 Bitcoin valued at $38.25 million, based on today’s Bitcoin prices.
On Tuesday, the labeled wallets—at least one of which was connected to Ulbricht by Coinbase director and on-chain analyst Conor Grogan in January—sent 33.7 BTC valued around $3 million to a new address ending in “z7ga54.”
Grogan’s assessment at the time highlighted the wallet ending in “WoPx1” that contains around 90 BTC, worth nearly $9 million, and is included in the Silk Road cluster labeled by Arkham. The wallet has not made a transaction in at least 14 years.
Along with the “WoPx1” wallet, Grogan said he connected around 430 BTC across dozens of wallets linked to Ulbricht, adding that while their holdings were “probably dust” 14 years ago, they’ve now grown to sizable sums with Bitcoin’s rise in value.
“Not going to share the addresses but all of them are public (cited in trial docs or directly adjacent) and tracked already by multiple sources,” Grogan posted in a January reply to his findings.
While reasons for Tuesday’s transactions are not immediately clear, if they are in fact connected to the defunct darknet exchange, then they could still be potentially seized by the federal government, according to one expert who spoke to Decrypt about the subject in January.
Around that time, a U.S. court approved the sale of $6.5 billion worth of Bitcoin that had been previously seized from Silk Road. Ulbricht, who was imprisoned for more than a decade for charges including conspiracy to traffic narcotics and money laundering, was granted a full and unconditional pardon by President Donald Trump in January.
He thanked the Bitcoin community for standing behind him when speaking a few months later at the Bitcoin 2025 conference.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
