Who Was The New York Bitcoin Broker?

[collardelay]

There is one character in the Mt. Gox story whose name has never received nearly enough attention: the "New York Bitcoin Broker".

In June 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Russian nationals Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, alleging that they were involved in the theft and laundering of approximately 647,000 BTC from Mt. Gox between 2011 and 2014.

But buried inside the indictment is a much more intriguing detail.

In April 2012, Bilyuchenko, Verner and their alleged co-conspirators supposedly entered into an “Advertising Contract” with an unnamed Bitcoin brokerage service based in the Southern District of New York.

The government alleges that the advertising arrangement was a disguise. And yet, the U.S. government did not name the broker.

That remains one of the great unanswered questions.

Some connected the broader laundering trail to early Bitcoin businesses including "BitInstant" and "Memory Dealers", but distinguished those companies from the unnamed “New York Bitcoin Broker.”

Was it simply an unwitting intermediary?

Was it knowingly participating in the scheme?

Or was the advertising contract itself merely a financial instrument disguised as a commercial agreement?

The indictment alleges the latter—but the public record does not appear to reveal the broker's identity.

And the Bitcoin trail is not entirely dead

The story becomes even more interesting when we jump forward more than a decade.

In December 2025, blockchain analysts reported that wallets associated with Aleksey Bilyuchenko moved approximately 1,300 BTC, then worth around $114 million, to unidentified exchanges.

The associated entity was reported to still control approximately 4,100 BTC, after roughly 2,300 BTC had been sold or moved during the preceding period.

Who was the “New York Bitcoin Broker”?

And if that broker could be identified, what else might it tell us about how the Mt. Gox coins were converted, moved and ultimately laundered?

Who controls the "1Feex" wallet that started it all?

Bitcoin's blockchain remembers.