Perseverance has continued to pay off in the crypto market - regardless of which company the money comes from. Eight years after the darknet marketplace Abraxas went offline, its former operators apparently converted old Bitcoin assets into cash. 4,800 old Bitcoin were moved to a cryptomixer through a series of transactions. Apparently, the wait was worth it. The value at the time: about two million US dollars, today as much as 144 million.

"Possibly the admins"

Abraxas went offline in 2015. Administrators allegedly defrauded users and dozens of Bitcoins were lost. The Darkweb marketplace sold all sorts of illegal goods, from drugs and weapons to fake IDs. The eternal image still attached to Bitcoin today is not entirely unjustified: payments were and are often made with cryptocurrencies on darkweb platforms.

An entity moved ~4800 BTC ($144M) originating from Abraxas darknet market which exit scammed in Nov 2015 after previously sitting dormant.

They consolidated funds and also deposited to a bitcoin mixer.

This graph shows an example of the movements from one of the addresses. pic.twitter.com/zVBSs6mrc4
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) October 23, 2023

As practical as that is, it appears that money flows are open. Years after the Darkweb platform disappeared from the scene, Twitter user "ZachXBT" has now traced old Bitcoin holdings. The first signs of life were there in May, before funds were further delayed in October. "The admins may be responsible for this." The trail also leads to a mixer, which would be used to hide the origin of the funds.

Bitcoin and the Darkweb

The Darkweb is a collective term for shielded websites that are not accessible through normal search engines. One of the most commonly used accesses is the Tor browser. This also gave access to the darknet platform Silk Road, which was one of the largest transshipment sites for illegal goods before it was dismantled in 2013.

The gap left by Silk Road was filled by other websites. Last year, the BKA (the German Federal Criminal Police Office) arrested the largest Darkweb marketplace to date: Hydra. 23 million euros worth of Bitcoin was seized. Hydra had more than 17 million customer accounts in 2020 and had an estimated turnover of 1.2 billion euros. According to Chainalysis total revenues from darknet markets after the shutdown are down by half to $1.5 billion by 2022.