Perseverance has still paid off in the crypto market – regardless of which business the funds come from. Eight years after the darknet marketplace Abraxas went offline, the former operators are apparently turning old Bitcoin assets into cash. 4,800 dusty Bitcoin were moved to a crypto mixer through a series of transactions. Apparently the wait was worth it. The equivalent back then: around two million US dollars. Today: 144 million.
“Possibly the admins”
Abraxas went offline in 2015. The operators are said to have defrauded users and tens of Bitcoins were lost. All sorts of illegal goods were sold on the darknet marketplace, from drugs and weapons to fake IDs. The eternal stigma that still attaches to Bitcoin today is not entirely unfounded: payments were and are often made with cryptocurrencies on darknet platforms.
As practical as that is, it turns out that money flows are open. Years after the darknet platform disappeared from the scene, Twitter user “ZachXBT” now has old Bitcoin holdings tracked. There were first signs of life in May, and the funds were then postponed further in October. “The admins may be responsible for this”. The trail also leads to a mixer, which is supposed to be used to conceal the origin of the funds.
Bitcoin and the Darknet
The Darknet is a collective term for shielded websites that cannot be accessed via normal search engines. One of the most used accesses is the Tor browser. This also gave access to the darknet platform Silk Road, which was one of the largest transshipment points for illegal goods before it was broken up in 2013. Payment was made with Bitcoin.
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The vacuum left by Silk Road was filled by other websites. Last year, the BKA busted the largest darknet marketplace to date: Hydra. 23 million euros in Bitcoin were seized. Hydra had over 17 million customer accounts in 2020 and had an estimated turnover of 1.2 billion euros. According to Chainalysis, total revenue from darknet markets fell by half to $1.5 billion in 2022 following the shutdown.
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