Exchanges are on alert in case of receiving funds from this wallet. It is one of the wallets that has had the largest amount of Bitcoin in history.
In the past weeks, a transfer reached a total of 69,369 BTC, equivalent to USD 1 billion. The wallet from which the transaction came relates to the Silk Road case. This is a market for illicit products on the dark web and one of the most emblematic court cases in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Alert on large cryptocurrency transactions occurs thanks to the Whale Alert account. It notified about the movement of funds that had remained immobile for at least five years.
According to the BitInfoCharts website, the address that received the funds is currently the fourth address with the highest amount of Bitcoin. It is probably one of the largest whales in the ecosystem.
Tom Robinson, CSO, and co-founder of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said on his LinkedIn account that the funds came from Silk Road. It is important to remember that this is the now-defunct market for illicit substances that the FBI closed in 2013.
Furthermore, Robinson further suggested that a Silk Road vendor or Ross Ulbricht himself may have transferred the funds. However, the analyst acknowledges that this would be rather unlikely as Ulbricht is under arrest, serving two life sentences plus 40 years in prison.
The address, possibly created in 2012, has had very few moves. In 2015, they transferred 101 BTC to the BTC-e website, an exchange that the authorities intervened under the allegation of facilitating money laundering. The mastermind of the case has been on trial in France since last October.
Robinson states that there was another deposit of part of the funds (501.5 BTC) in Bitcoin Fog also in 2012. It is the main service to mix Bitcoin and obfuscate identities on this network.
Did the Hackers Succeed in Gaining Access to the Wallet?
There have been suggestions that the private keys of the wallet controlling the address that sent the Bitcoin are in an encrypted file on the Internet. Hackers have spent years struggling to crack the key before anyone else does, in a kind of contest for a hoard of Bitcoin.
However, there has not been confirmed whether the hackers have decrypted the file or any of them has made the latest move. In any case, Elliptic has contacted exchanges and other services to prevent them from receiving Bitcoin deposits related to that address. Their objective is to stop the owner from being able to trade them for cash or other cryptocurrencies.
Silk Road accumulated a total of 614,000 BTC by charging fees to its users, who were trading illicit products and allegedly criminal services. In 2013, the FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht, managing to seize 174,000 BTC. Currently, they presume that the rest, more than 400,000 BTC of the total amount, has completely disappeared.
Bitcoin has maintained its stable price during the US presidential elections. However, there has been speculation that this has been an opportunity to discreetly transfer the aforementioned amount of Bitcoin. This has not been the case as the entire community is aware of the transaction.
By Alexander Salazar
