Alphabay currently contains 139 btc
https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/AlphaBayMarket
I haven't seen a marketplace "break" withdrawals by reducing the transaction (miners') fee since the start of the sheepMarketplace scam.
to compare, a healthy marketplace's balance on a Saturday is 4000 btc
https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/NucleusMarket
I've been careful to stick to the facts, without speculation or advising anyone to withdraw their bitcoin..
Alphabay's wallets are impossible to profile. We do not even know where that 137 BTC comes from. Many crawlers like walletexplorer profile wallets by following transaction change inputs coming from "test" withdrawals. When you followed all change outputs, you generally have a good idea of the marketplace's holdings and you can profile their wallets with quite good accuracy.
This holds true for hot wallet holdings. Alphabay's cold coins are tumbled and placed in thousands of hidden wallets that are impossible to find / prove, and contain very small amounts to go under the radar. And we move them often. Alphabay's trading volume / coin holdings are secret and will never be released. This removes possible evidence against staff members or large vendors who might get arrested.
As for the data shown by WalletExplorer: some addresses are true, some not. We have internal tumblers, so their crawler must have followed dummy change outputs from withdrawals that are in reality internal mixing. This is another reason why some users might have deposit addresses that already have transactions on them. This is all part of an ongoing effort to protect our users. It would be easy to check all addresses on WalletExplorer and see which ones send coins to exchangers, and arrest people that way. Fortunately, we took care of obfuscating this track.