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Donald Trump has pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for masterminding an online marketplace for illegal drugs and hacking services.
On his second day in office, the new president fulfilled a campaign promise that he would release Ulbricht, whose imprisonment over the past decade had become a leading cause for bitcoin evangelists and libertarian groups.
At Ulbricht’s trial, US prosecutors said he had built the anonymous marketplace, known as Silk Road, to exploit the anonymity of the dark web and the digital currency bitcoin. Supporters of Ulbricht had portrayed him as a victim of a government that was trying to turn web hosting into a criminal activity.
“The scum that worked to convict him [Ulbricht] were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social late on Tuesday.
Trump had pledged to pardon Ulbricht, who was arrested at a San Francisco public library in 2013, at the Libertarian party’s national convention last May.
Announcing the pardon, Trump said it was “in honour of the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly”.
“This is a seismic shift, a rupture in the suffocating wall of state oppression,” the Libertarian party said following the pardon.
The move deepens Trump’s links to the crypto market after launching his own token late on Friday. Some of the industry’s biggest companies and names backed Trump’s bid for the presidency, donating millions of dollars to his election campaign.
Trump pledged to make America the “bitcoin superpower of the world” and end the perceived persecution that the industry has felt under Joe Biden’s administration.
Some executives celebrated Ulbricht’s release. Jesse Powell, co-founder of US crypto exchange Kraken, thanked Trump for keeping his word and pardoning Ulbricht. “You have our admiration, respect and loyalty,” he wrote on X, adding that the former felon “is an absolute legend and inspiration”.
“Finally Ross is free,” said Paolo Ardoino, chief executive of stablecoin operator Tether.
Silk Road was run on the Tor Network and accepted only bitcoin as payment, which US prosecutors said had helped keep its users and their locations anonymous.
The site allowed criminals to sell vast quantities of drugs, computer hacking services and forged documents, among other illegal goods and services, prosecutors said. It was named after the historic network of trading routes linking the Middle East and China with western countries.
Prosecutors at the trial prepared statements from family members of victims who bought and later died as a result of drugs purchased from the website.
At the sentencing hearing in 2015, the judge said Ulbricht had commissioned and paid for five murders, although she acknowledged that ultimately he was not charged over that and there was no evidence any murder was carried out. The US government seized 173,991 bitcoins from Ulbricht’s laptop at the time of his arrest.
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