When Ross Ulbricht received a $31 million bitcoin donation last weekend from an unknown source, many observers saw it as more than a very nice welcome-home gift. Rumors swirled that the creator of the Silk Road, less than five months after receiving a pardon from Donald Trump that saved him from a lifetime in prison, was sending himself a trove of his stashed criminal proceeds from his days running the dark web's first black market more than a decade prior.

Now cryptocurrency tracing investigators say they've arrived at a stranger explanation: The money wasn't originally Ulbricht's, and didn't come from the Silk Road. Instead, they suspect it came from a different long-defunct dark-web black market: AlphaBay .

The crypto tracing firm Chainalysis tells WIRED that, based on bloc

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