A little over 11 years and three months ago, Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the science fiction section of a San Francisco public library, caught with his laptop still logged into the Silk Road, the world’s first dark web drug market he created . and ran under the pseudonym the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Now, after being sentenced to life in prison and spending more than a decade behind bars, Ulbricht will walk free, thanks to Donald Trump—and to the president’s ever-closer ties to the US cryptocurrency world.

“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which has so strongly supported me, it was my pleasure to just grant a full and unconditional pardon to her son, Ross , to be signed.” President Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night and misspelled Ulbricht’s last name. “The scum who worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics involved in modern day weaponization of the government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”

For nearly two and a half years after Ulbricht created the Silk Road in 2011, the dark web facilitated the sale of large quantities of drugs, as well as forged documents, money laundering services and, sometimes, guns, for hundreds. millions of dollars in bitcoin payments. After the FBI located Silk Road’s server in Iceland in 2013 and arrested the then 29-year-old Ulbricht in San Francisco, he was convicted on seven counts related to drug distribution, money laundering and computer hacking, as well as a “continuing criminal enterprise” statute—sometimes known as the “kingpin statute”—usually reserved for mob bosses and cartel leaders. In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison, a sentence longer than even the 20-plus years prosecutors had sought in the case.

Since then, a Free Ross movement has continually pushed for Ulbricht’s release, first in a failed appeal, then in petitions for clemency. Many of Ulbricht’s supporters have long argued that the Silk Road was a principled libertarian experiment in free trade, one in which Ulbricht allowed only “victimless crime” — despite prosecutors arguing at his trial that at least six people died to opioid overdoses from drugs associated with the Silk Road. They point out that Ulbricht never sold or possessed drugs himself, and instead ran a website that facilitated their sale. And they argue that by moving the sale of drugs online, he reduced violence in the drug trade and committed no violence himself.

However, that argument is complicated by allegations that Ulbricht tried to have six people killed who posed a threat to him or the Silk Road. In the end, all six alleged murders-for-hire were false — one was staged by undercover DEA agents and another five were a hoax. Ulbricht was charged with only one of those alleged paid murders in a separate prosecution in Maryland, which was then dropped after he received a life sentence in his New York trial. But evidence presented at Ulbricht’s trial showed that he allegedly arranged those murders and even pointed out transactions on Bitcoin’s blockchain showing a payment for them from Ulbricht’s laptop to the would-be killer.

Those murder-for-hire allegations actually dissuaded the first Trump administration from granting clemency to Ulbricht. The White House considered freeing Ulbricht in 2020, but ultimately rejected the idea because of the alleged role of violence in the case, according to one former government official involved in the process who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity.

Since then, however, the Trump administration has shifted its stance on Ulbricht’s case — in part, perhaps, because of its embrace of the libertarian cryptocurrency community, for whom Ulbricht became a martyr and cause célèbre. At the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, DC, last May, then-presidential candidate Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence “on day one” if re-elected. (In the end, day one passed without mercy for Ulbricht, even as Trump pardoned more than a thousand participants in the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol, although Trump ally Elon Musk promised in a post to X on Monday night that ” Ross will also be freed.”)