Bitcoin Unlimited recently made news after it received an unusually large donation of around $500,000 in bitcoins. The donation amount is now mired in controversy after it was claimed to have come from a questionable source.
According to few reports, the donation received by the project were allegedly stolen from Kraken, a leading digital currency exchange. There were unconfirmed reports of Kraken suffering from a security breach that resulted in a theft. While the exact amount of Bitcoin stolen during the incident is not clear, few users tracking the stolen funds on the Bitcoin blockchain believe that it is the same stolen stash which has made its way to Bitcoin Unlimited’s wallets.
A portion of Bitcoin that was donated to Bitcoin Unlimited seems to have followed the same path through coin mixing services as rest of the stolen funds. A Bitcoin taint analysis conducted by one of the Redditor shows the whole transaction tree. The OP, without making any conclusions has put it out there for the community to come to their own conclusion.
Legend
Grey: Kraken address from which the bitcoins were stolen from
Orange: Address to which stolen bitcoins were allegedly sent to
Green: Address containing most of the stolen bitcoins
Blue: Addresses to which the bitcoins were sent for mixing
Yellow: Bitcoin Unlimited’s donation address
The influx of new funds into Bitcoin Unlimited seems to have already been put to good use. The platform has announced the availability of new research funding for new Bitcoin projects. According to the latest blog post by Peter Rizun, the major areas of interest for Bitcoin Unlimited includes
- Research into longer-term scaling initiatives
- Development of incremental scaling improvements
- Empirical studies into challenges revolving around scaling
- Quality control, including improvement of the documentation process, website improvement and automation of regression testing of releases
- Outreach
The funding will be subject to the approval of the BUIP.
Bitcoin Unlimited has been slowly gaining adoption as well, thanks to Bitcoin Core’s snail-paced approach towards scalability of the protocol. Recently, Bitcoin.com Mining Pool started running Bitcoin Unlimited on its mainnet. We may see more mining pools extending their support in the near future.
Ref: Peter Rizun on Medium | Reddit |Image: BitcoinUnlimited.info