Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug marketplace and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian worlds, has been granted a pardon by US president Donald Trump.
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, 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 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 on the dark web, became an international drug marketplace, facilitating more than 1.5 million transactions, including sales of heroin, cocaine and other illicit substances.
Prosecutors claimed that 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, 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’.”
On Monday, after Mr Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6th riot at the US Capitol, Elon Musk, one of the president’s biggest supporters, responded to a concerned post on the social platform X, writing that “Ross will be freed too.”
Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin, Texas, was arrested in 2013, after the FBI tracked him down at a library in San Francisco. At his sentencing in the US District Court in Manhattan two years later, a judge called 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”.
Last year, Mr Trump embraced Ulbricht’s cause on the campaign trail, first in a speech at a libertarian event and later at an annual bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee. He doubled down on social media, posting the hashtag #FreeRossDayOne on Truth Social, the site he owns.
After the election, a message from 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. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times