Ross Ulbricht, SilkRoad founder, was gifted 300 BTC in his donation wallet.

Ross Ulbricht, founder of the defunct darknet marketplace Silk Road and recently freed following a 2025 presidential pardon, has seen a major inflow of funds to a Bitcoin address publicly identified as his donation wallet. Blockchain monitoring accounts and media reported that this wallet received a single transfer of 300 BTC—worth roughly $31–32 million at recent prices—one of the largest known individual transactions to a support wallet linked to Ulbricht. The transfer arrived shortly after Ulbricht raised about 12.3 BTC (around $1.3 million) by auctioning prison-era belongings, including prison ID cards and artwork, via the Scarce City marketplace. The origin and nature of the 300 BTC remain a subject of active debate. Analytics platforms such as Arkham Intelligence have associated the receiving address with Ulbricht, and on-chain data show that the coins were routed through Jambler, a centralized Bitcoin mixing service rarely used at scale compared with more common decentralized privacy tools. This routing pattern led some observers to speculate that the transfer might be a self-funded move or otherwise linked to older Bitcoin holdings, while others argue that activity on related wallets during Ulbricht’s incarceration makes the “self-donation” theory less straightforward. Regardless of provenance, the transaction significantly increases the resources available to Ulbricht and his supporters and highlights ongoing public and on-chain interest in one of the most high-profile figures in Bitcoin’s early illicit-market history.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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