Analytical company PeckShield tracked the movement of 48,998 BTC (about $1.08 billion at the time of writing), confiscated by the US government from the darknet marketplace Silk Road.
#PeckShieldAlert 49k $BTC (worth $1 Billion) from wallets related to US Government law enforcement seizures have been transferred to #Coinbase (~9.8k $BTC, worth $217M), bc1qf2…fsv (30k $BTC) & bc1qe7…rdg (9k $BTC) #SilkRoad pic.twitter.com/4MzlvDzkut
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 8, 2023
30,174 BTC and 8,999 BTC flowed to two new wallets, while another 9,825 BTC were sent to the American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
At two addresses, US law enforcement held 51,352 BTC seized from Silk Road in November 2021 and March 2022.
In 2015 a court found Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht guilty of operating the darknet marketplace and other crimes, including drug trafficking and a conspiracy to launder funds. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 2019 venture capitalist Tim Draper called for Ulbricht’s release. In March 2020 a petition with a similar demand gathered 275,000 signatures.
Subsequently, billionaire Elon Musk called it overreach of the Silk Road founder’s sentence. “There were certainly grounds for punishment, but the sentence seems excessive,” he said.
In November 2021, the founder of Silk Road announced that would auction off his NFT collection. It was purchased by the decentralized autonomous organization FreeRossDAO for 1,446 ETH (~$6.2 million at the time).
In November 2022 Bitcoin Magazine opened in Nashville, Tennessee, USA an exhibition space dedicated to Ulbricht.