US President Donald Trump has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the jailed founder of Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were brought and sold.

During his first few days in power, Trump has signed many executive orders including one delaying the ban on TikTok, and also pardoning and communing the prison sentences for the rioters who took part in the attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021.

Now Trump has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the notorious Silk Road darknet market, before it was closed down.

Silk Road and Ulbricht

Silk Road had used the Tor anonymisation network and accepted Bitcoins as payment in order to evade law enforcement.

It operated from at least 2011 until October 2013, when authorities seized the website and arrested Ulbricht in a San Francisco public library.

Web developer Ross William Ulbricht was accused of being ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’, the man who founded and ran Silk Road, which was famous for selling almost any kind of drug imaginable, as well as porn and hacking services.

Drugs bought and sold on the site include heroin, cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine.

Silk Road was also accused of offering murder-for-hire deals, and at least one member hired people to murder a person who had threatened to release the identities of thousands of users of the service.

By the time Silk Road was shut down following Ulbricht’s arrest, the website had generated almost $213.9 million in sales and $13.2m in commissions.

Ulbricht was accused of the crimes of narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering, and in 2015 a Manhattan jury ruled Ross Ulbricht guilty on all counts

Several others involved with the dark web marketplace as administrators were also convicted.

On 29 May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to double life imprisonment plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole.

Ulbricht took his appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2017 and the US Supreme Court in 2018, but these appeals were unsuccessful.

In November 2020 the US Department of Justice seized more than $1 billion (£760m) in Bitcoin linked to Silk Road.

The DoJ confirmed the seizure after cryptocurrency watchers noticed a cache of about 70,000 Bitcoins being moved, and the action at the time was the largest seizure of cryptocurrency in history.

Trump pardon

Now 12 years after the Silk Road takedown, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he has pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbrich.

Ulbricht identifies as a libertarian, a political philosophy that holds freedom and liberty as primary values.

Ulbricht’s conviction had become a cause célèbre in American libertarian circles, and Donald Trump had made a promise at the Libertarian Party National Convention during the 2024 United States presidential election to pardon Ulbrich.

“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” Trump posted.

“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” Trump added. “He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”