Coinbase's Chief Product Officer, Conor Grogan, has identified 430 BTC across multiple wallets that are believed to be associated with Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace.
The assets have remained untouched for over 13 years. They are not related to the ~174,000 BTC marketplace confiscated by the US government.
"Back then these were probably dust wallets, now, collectively, they are worth about $47M," Grogan wrote.
However, in his opinion, it is unlikely that Ulbricht kept the private keys to bitcoin addresses somewhere all this time.
‘We'll find out soon enough!’ the expert added.
On 21 January, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order granting a full and unconditional pardon to the Silk Road creator. Ulbricht's release was one of the politician's election campaign promises.
US authorities arrested the founder of the darknet marketplace in October 2013. In May 2015, US District Judge Catherine Forrest found him guilty of drug trafficking, drug conspiracy, computer network hacking and money laundering, as well as leading a criminal organisation. The platform creator received a double life sentence without parole, of which he served 11 years.
Ulbricht's case attracted widespread public attention. More than 250 organisations, celebrities and opinion leaders spoke out in favour of his release. In 2019, prominent venture capitalist Tim Draper was among them. Later, Ilon Musk said that the sentence to the Silk Road creator turned out to be too cruel.
