President Trump on Tuesday granted a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug marketplace and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian worlds.
In doing so, Mr. Trump fulfilled a promise that he made repeatedly on the campaign trail as he courted political contributions from the crypto industry, which spent more than $100 million to influence the outcome of the election. A Bitcoin pioneer, Mr. Ulbricht, 40, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015, after he was convicted on charges that included distributing narcotics on the internet.
“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, misspelling Mr. Ulbricht’s name and making a reference to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
In its nearly three years of existence, Silk Road, which operated in a shady corner of the internet known as the dark web, became an international drug marketplace, facilitating more than 1.5 million transactions, including sales of heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances. (The site generated over $200 million in revenue, according to authorities.) In court, prosecutors claimed that Mr. Ulbricht had also solicited the murders of people whom he considered threats — but acknowledged there was no evidence that the killings took place.
Despite his crimes, Mr. Ulbricht has remained popular with crypto enthusiasts because Silk Road was one of the first venues where people used Bitcoin to buy and sell goods. For years, his supporters have argued that his sentence was overly punitive and adopted the slogan “Free Ross” online and at industry gatherings.
“It’s hard to argue that Ross Ulbricht wasn’t the most successful and influential entrepreneur of the early Bitcoin era,” said Pete Rizzo, an editor at the news publication Bitcoin Magazine. “This is the industry banding together and saying, ‘We’re going to reclaim our own.’”
Mr. Ulbrich’s pardon was eagerly anticipated by crypto enthusiasts. On Monday, after Mr. Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Elon Musk, one of the president’s biggest supporters, responded to a concerned post on X, writing that “Ross will be freed too.”
Mr. Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin, Texas, was arrested in 2013, after the F.B.I. tracked him down at a library in San Francisco. At his sentencing in Federal District Court in Manhattan two years later, a judge called Mr. Ulbricht “the kingpin of a worldwide digital drug-trafficking enterprise” and said that his actions were “terribly destructive to our social fabric.”
At least six deaths were attributable to drugs bought on Silk Road, prosecutors said. Addressing the court, the father of one of the people who died said that “all Ross Ulbricht cared about was his growing pile of Bitcoins.”
But the life sentence struck many observers as harsh. In 2017, the federal appeals court for the Second Circuit, in affirming Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction, acknowledged the severe nature of the punishment.
“Although we might not have imposed the same sentence ourselves in the first instance,” the court said, “on the facts of this case a life sentence was within the range of permissible decisions that the district court could have reached.”
Mr. Ulbricht has been serving his sentence at a federal prison in Tucson, Ariz. Supporters in the crypto industry, in calling for his release, have noted that he was convicted of a nonviolent crime and was never tried on prosecutors’ most explosive allegation that he paid to have people killed. At a Bitcoin conference in Miami in 2021, Mr. Ulbricht’s supporters played a recording of him speaking from prison.
“I had so many big dreams for Bitcoin,” he said.
Last year, Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Ulbricht’s cause on the campaign trail, first in a speech at a libertarian event and later at an annual Bitcoin conference in Nashville. He doubled down on social media, posting the hashtag #FreeRossDayOne on Truth Social, the site he owns.
After the election, a message from Mr. Ulbricht posted on X said he had “immense gratitude to everyone who voted for President Trump on my behalf.”
“I can finally see the light of freedom at the end of the tunnel,” the post said.
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