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Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Is Waiting for Trump to Keep His Word—and Set Him Free

On the campaign trail, incoming US president Donald Trump vowed to release Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht from prison if reelected. Will he keep his word?

For two and a half years starting in 2011, the Silk Road pioneered the dark web market model of using bitcoin to allow buyers and sellers to trade in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of highly illegal contraband—eventually including every type of narcotic imaginable as well as counterfeit documents and money laundering services—while hiding their identities through the anonymity software Tor. Nonetheless, those murder-for-hire allegations—which Southern District of New York prosecutors didn’t bring as charges but did support at trial with chat logs and Bitcoin blockchain transaction records—played a key role in quashing the Free Ross campaign’s attempt to lobby for a pardon during Trump’s first term. The Free Ross campaign has received growing support among libertarian politicians, prison reform activists and particularly members of the crypto industry, for whom Ulbricht is something of a martyr for his part in spreading the bitcoin gospel and demonstrating utility for the technology through Silk Road.

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