A Coinbase official confirmed that connected wallets owned by Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht currently contain 430 Bitcoin in storage. Conor Grogan, who works as the product strategy director at Coinbase, revealed the discovery on X (Twitter) January 22, 2025.
Grogan discovered a series of wallets he linked to Ulbricht that had not moved for over 13 years and contained 430 BTC. The U.S. government seized Bitcoins from Silk Road but did not spot the funds in the wallets connected to this online black market that Ulbricht created.
“I found ~430 BTC across dozens of wallets associated with Ross Ulbricht that were not confiscated by the USGovt and have been untouched for 13+ years. Back then these were probably dust wallets, now, collectively, they are worth about $47M,” Grogan noted.
Coinbase Executive Unveils Ulbricht’s Hidden Bitcoin Stash
The following day after President Trump granted Ulbricht his complete freedom, he learned of this hidden Bitcoin stash. On January 21, 2025 the US government released Ulbricht from prison because he had served two life sentences plus 40 years for operating a criminal venture and money laundering. During his inaugural ceremony on January 20, the President granted the first presidential pardon for business of his presidency.
In 2013, the U.S. government confiscated 174000 bitcoins from the Silk Road marketplace. After his 2013 arrest, Ulbricht received a 2015 punishment for operating the illegal marketplace, which used Bitcoin as its payment system. Despite government actions against Silk Road and Bitcoin seizure operations, they did not detect the smaller wallets linked to Ulbricht.
After many years untouched, these wallets now store Bitcoin holdings, which have increased greatly in value. A single wallet contains 88.77 bitcoin, now valued at $9.4 million. Other wallets hold Bitcoin Cash tokens received through an airdrop after the 2017 fork event.
According to Grogan’s assessment, Ulbricht may not hold the key information needed to claim these funds. Grogan explained his proactive way of sharing his findings while addressing concerns about his public disclosure.
“Not going to share the addresses but all of them are public (cited in trial docs or directly adjacent ) and tracked already by multiple sources.”
