More than 649 million rubles in cryptocurrency were arrested on the wallets of the owner of the Hydra servers

Investigators estimated the value of the cryptocurrency seized in the wallets of 35-year-old Dmitry Pavlov at 649 million rubles. This is stated in the investigation materials announced in court in the case of his alleged accomplice working on the Hydra darknet marketplace.

It follows from Pavlov's own testimony that he received a reward of about 15 million rubles a year in the form of salaries and bonuses for maintaining the servers' operability.

According to him, the man did not cash out these funds, hoping to make money on the growth of cryptocurrency exchange rates. For the cost of maintaining the service, Pavlov additionally received money from the owners of Hydra in cash.

It took 1.5–2 million rubles per month to rent and maintain the servers of the German company Hetzner. To reimburse the costs, Hydra's top managers periodically sent couriers with cash in their bags to Pavlov.

The annual turnover of the marketplace itself was up to $1.7 billion at the time of closure, and for all five years of the site's existence, the volume of transactions on it amounted to about $5 billion. Such amounts follow from calculations of cryptocurrency transactions by the New York company Chainalysis. Similar assessments are shared by Russian experts questioned in the case.

An employee of Rosfinmonitoring estimated the direct income of the site in the amount of 2 to 5% of the transactions. In turn, a participant in the investigation who spoke in court insisted that only the net profit of the creators of Hydra, taking into account related services, amounted to about 100 billion rubles per year.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

Stoglavaya Hydra: the owner of the servers of the "online drug cartel" appeared in court