Before the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) took enforcement action against Bitzlato on January 18, some people knew little about it. It was co-founded in 2016 by Anatoly Legkodymov, a Russian who was recently arrested.

According to a Russian source, Legkodymov has a 73.4% stake in Bitzlato, and Bitzlato has a company office on the upper floor of the skyscraper of the federal commerce building in Moscow and accepts $100000 or more in deals. It is reported that Legkodymov and his important partners in Bitzlato also participated in the Russian landing password mining equipment distribution company A-HVT.

Legkodymov has an ancient and tortuous history in the field of login password, which can be traced back to more than ten years ago. His first post on the BTC conversation community forum dates back to 2011, in which he described more than 50 BTC losses:

In an online forum in 2017, Legkodymov described the process of setting up the Bitzlato exchange:

My team and I have described thousands of failure scenarios, including simulating the hacking of exchange users and operators, and we have found a solution that allows us to run the BTC exchange in a relatively highly secure way.

Although Bitzlato barely attracted attention before the Justice Department took action on Jan. 18, Chainanalysis noted in a report last February that the exchange had "received $206 million from the sales market for dark web sites, $224.5 million from fraud and $9 million from blackmail virus cyber attacks."

Illegal and high-risk transactions accounted for 48% of the company's business at that time, according to the report.

The Justice Department announced that a conference would be held earlier in the day to discuss the charges, but did not say which companies would be involved. This led many people to speculate that more companies were involved, and his response was somewhat ironic:

One lawyer commented online that Bitzlatow's action was "a grand blueprint for future behavior, and it may even be expected to act now."

Others feel that there is a darker power at the level of overthrowing this dark online artist:

Bitzlatow himself is clearly unprepared for actions that are about to overtake him. On January 18, Twitter released rates for the morning to 1488 followers.