Who donated 300 BTC to Ross Ulbricht?
The release of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht from prison continues to motivate curious transfers from some of the oldest and wealthiest bitcoin (BTC) wallets.
Indeed, over the weekend, someone donated 300 BTC, worth $31 million, to one of Ulbricht’s personal wallets.
Sourced from BTC from 2014 or earlier, onlookers initially viewed the deposit as a donation. Though not all as generous as the $31 million transfer, donations to Ulbricht from Bitcoiners have been anything but rare since his January pardon.
Ulbricht has earned direct donations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, over $1 million via auctions of his personal belongings, and untold millions from his mother’s NFT and donation campaigns from 2024 and prior.
Just last week, Ulbricht also took to the main stage at the largest BTC conference in history, Bitcoin 2025, and Bitcoin artist CryptoGraffiti donated a bronze statue of the Silk Road logo.
The $31 million donation exceeds the next-largest Ulbricht had received. Earlier this year, a Solana memecoin community attempted to give him about $12 million worth of tokens. Unfortunately, he (or someone controlling its keys) fumbled it entirely and lost at least 90% of its peak value.
In any case, this weekend’s donation was by far the largest publicly known donation to Ulbricht since his release from prison.
However, despite the amount being clear, the mystery of the donor remains.
Read more: No, the US government hasn’t liquidated 69,000 Silk Road bitcoin — yet
De-mixing Ross Ulbricht’s largest donation
Interestingly, the BTC involved in the donation passed through a centralized mixing service called Jambler. The operators of that coin mixer attempted — yet ultimately failed — to obscure the original source of Ulbricht’s donation.
Because the BTC originated over a decade ago, some people initially thought that the transfer could have been Ulbricht transferring his own BTC through Jambler.
However, forensic analyst ZachXBT has stated that the transfer is unlikely to be a coin wash by Ulbricht himself. Indeed, there was on-chain activity in the donor’s wallets during Ulbricht’s internet-free incarceration.
Although ZachXBT isn’t confident enough to name the donor, he is confident that this weekend’s 300 BTC donation is not from Ulbricht.
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