On Tuesday, Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the drug market Silk Road and a cult hero in the cryptocurrency world. By doing so, Trump fulfilled a promise he repeatedly made during the election campaign, seeking political donations from the cryptocurrency industry, which spent more than $100 million on his campaign, writes The New York Times. The 40-year-old Ulbricht, a bitcoin pioneer, was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in 2015, after being found guilty of drug distribution charges over the internet.
«The scoundrels who worked on his conviction were the same crazies involved in the modern use of government weapons against me», — Trump stated on his network Truth Social.
Meanwhile, as the publication notes, during its nearly three years of existence, Silk Road, operating in the darknet, turned into an international drug market, facilitating over 1.5 million transactions, including the sale of heroin, cocaine, and other illegal substances. In court, prosecutors claimed that Ulbricht also offered to kill people he considered a threat, but admitted there was no evidence of murders.
Ulbricht remains popular among cryptocurrency enthusiasts, as Silk Road was one of the first platforms where people used bitcoin to buy and sell goods. For many years, his supporters have argued that the sentence was excessively punitive.
Ulbricht was arrested in 2013, after the FBI tracked him down in a library in San Francisco. During the sentencing in the Federal District Court in Manhattan two years later, the judge called him the «leader of a worldwide digital drug trafficking enterprise» and said his actions were «horribly destructive to our social fabric», notes NYT. According to prosecutors, at least six deaths were linked to drugs purchased on Silk Road. Speaking in court, the father of one of the deceased said that «all Ross Ulbricht cared about was the growing pile of bitcoins».