President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug market and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian world.
In doing so, Mr. Trump fulfilled a promise he repeatedly made during the campaign as he sought political contributions from the cryptocurrency industry, which spent more than $100 million to influence the outcome of the election. Bitcoin pioneer Mr. Ulbricht, 40, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015, after being convicted on charges that included distributing drugs online.
“I just called Ross William Albright’s mother to tell her about this,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, misspelling Mr. Albricht’s name and referring to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. “The scum who worked to convict him were the same lunatics who participated in arming the government against me in modern times.”
During 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 market, facilitating more than 1.5 million transactions, including sales of heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances. (The site generated more than $200 million in revenue, according to authorities.) In court, prosecutors claimed that Mr. Ulbricht also requested the killing of people he considered a threat — but I confess There was no evidence that the killings had occurred.
Despite his crimes, Mr. Ulbricht has remained popular with cryptocurrency enthusiasts because the Silk Road was one of the first places people used Bitcoin to buy and sell goods. For many years, his supporters have claimed that his sentence was overly punitive, adopting the slogan “Freedom for Russians” 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, editor of the news publication Bitcoin Magazine. “This is the industry coming together and saying, ‘We are going to take our industry back.’”
Mr. Ulbricht’s pardon was eagerly anticipated by cryptocurrency 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 also be released.”
Mr. Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin, Texas, was arrested in 2013, after the FBI tracked him down to a bookstore in San Francisco. At his sentencing in Federal District Court in Manhattan two years later, a judge described Mr. Ulbricht as “the leader of a global digital drug trafficking enterprise” and said his actions were “terribly destructive to our social fabric.”
Prosecutors said at least six deaths were attributed to drugs purchased on the Silk Road. Speaking to 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 Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in affirming Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction, recognized the harsh nature of the sentence.
“Although we may not have imposed the same sentence ourselves in the trial court, on the facts of this case, a life sentence was within the range of permissible decisions the district court could have reached,” the court said.
Mr. Ulbricht is serving his sentence in a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. Cryptocurrency industry supporters, Demanding his releasethey noted, he was convicted of a nonviolent crime and was never tried based on prosecutors’ more controversial claims that he paid to kill people. At a Bitcoin conference in Miami in 2021, Mr. Ulbricht’s supporters played a recording of him speaking from prison.
“I had a lot of big dreams regarding Bitcoin,” he said.
After the election, a letter from Mr. Ulbricht was published on the X website He said He had “tremendous 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 read.
Benjamin Weiser Contributed to reports.
