Ross Ulbricht has been pardoned by President Donald Trump

On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, who had been serving a life sentence following his conviction for operating an underground online marketplace used by thousands of drug dealers and other individuals to conduct over $200 million in illicit transactions using bitcoin.

The pardon fulfilled a campaign promise by Trump to secure Ulbricht’s release. Ulbricht, now 40, had been imprisoned since his 2013 arrest in what became a landmark case shortly after the rise of cryptocurrency.

"The scum that worked to convict him were the same lunatics involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me," Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.

Trump's administration is expected to pivot sharply away from the regulatory crackdowns on the cryptocurrency sector that characterized former President Joe Biden's tenure.

Trump had announced his intention to commute Ulbricht’s sentence earlier in May during a speech at the Libertarian National Convention. The Libertarian Party, which advocates for drug legalization, had championed Ulbricht’s release, calling his case an example of government overreach.

Ulbricht’s arrest marked the end of what prosecutors described as a global black-market operation that, between 2011 and 2013, facilitated more than $214 million in illegal drug sales and other criminal activities.

The Silk Road website operated using the Tor network, allowing users to communicate anonymously, and accepted bitcoin payments to obscure buyers’ and sellers’ identities and locations.

Prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht, operating under the alias "Dread Pirate Roberts" (a nod to the 1987 film The Princess Bride), took extreme measures to keep the marketplace running, including allegedly soliciting murders of individuals who posed threats to the site. However, they also acknowledged that no evidence showed any murders were carried out.

Ulbricht admitted to creating Silk Road, which his defense attorney described during the trial as a platform for a "freewheeling, free-market site." However, his legal team argued that he later handed over control of the platform to others and was ultimately drawn back in as a "fall guy" for its true operators.

"I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and to preserve their privacy and anonymity," Ulbricht said during his sentencing in May 2015.

In February 2015, a federal jury in Manhattan found Ulbricht guilty on charges including drug distribution via the internet, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and money laundering.

"What you did was unprecedented," former U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest said during sentencing. "And in breaking that ground as the first person, you sit here as the defendant having to pay the consequences for that."