President Trump on Tuesday granted clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug market and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency and libertarian world.
In doing so, Trump fulfilled a promise he made several times during the campaign, soliciting political contributions from the cryptocurrency 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 being found guilty of charges that included distributing narcotics over the Internet.
“I just called Ross William Ulbright’s mother to let her know,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, misspelling Mr. Ulbricht’s name and referring to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. “The scum who worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics involved in the government’s modern weaponization against me.”
In its nearly three years of existence, Silk Road, which operated in a dark 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 more than $200 million in revenue, according to authorities.) In court, prosecutors said that Mr. Ulbricht had also solicited the killing of people he considered threats, but acknowledged that there were no evidence that the murders had occurred.
Despite his crimes, Mr. Ulbricht remained popular among cryptocurrency enthusiasts because Silk Road was one of the first places where people used Bitcoin to buy and sell goods. For years, his supporters argued that his sentence was overly punitive and adopted the slogan “Free Ross” online and at industry rallies.
“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 Bitcoin Magazine. “This is the industry coming together and saying, ‘We’re going to reclaim what’s ours.’”
Mr. Ulbricht’s pardon was eagerly awaited by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. On Monday, after 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 freed.”
Mr. Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin, Texas, was arrested in 2013, after the FBI tracked him to a San Francisco library. At his sentencing in Federal District Court in Manhattan two years later, a judge called Mr. Ulbricht “the kingpin of a global digital drug trafficking enterprise” and said his actions were “terribly destructive to our social fabric.” .
At least six deaths are attributable to drugs purchased on Silk Road, prosecutors said. Addressing the court, the father of one of the deceased said that “all Ross Ulbricht cared about was his growing pile of Bitcoin.”
But the life sentence seemed harsh to many observers. In 2017, the federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, affirming Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction, recognized the severity of the punishment.
“Although we could not have imposed the same sentence ourselves at first instance,” the court said, “on the realities of this case, a life sentence was within the range of permissible decisions the district court could have made.”
Mr. Ulbricht is serving his sentence in a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. Crypto industry advocates, in calling for his release, noted that he was convicted of a nonviolent crime and was never tried based on prosecutors’ more explosive allegations that he paid to have people killed. During 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, Trump took up Ulbricht’s cause on the campaign trail, first in a speech at a libertarian event and then at an annual Bitcoin conference in Nashville. He doubled down on his social media efforts, 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 for 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 reads.
Benjamin Weiss contributed to the reporting.