Ross William Ulbricht (/ˈʊlbrɪkt/; born March 27, 1984)[1] is an American who created and operated the darknet market Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013.

[13] Ulbricht attended the University of Texas at Dallas on a full academic scholarship[11] and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in physics.

[13] Ulbricht received an additional scholarship to attend Pennsylvania State University, where he was in a master's degree program in materials science and engineering and studied crystallography.

[12] Palmertree, cofounder of Good Wagon Books, eventually moved to Dallas, leaving Ulbricht to run the bookseller by himself.

[16] In his personal diary, he outlined his idea for a website "where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them".

Silk Road ran as an onion service on the Tor network, which implements data encryption and routes traffic through intermediary servers to anonymize the source and destination Internet Protocol addresses.

[20][21] He attributed his inspiration for creating the Silk Road marketplace to the novel Alongside Night and the works of Samuel Edward Konkin III.

[23][24] Ulbricht was connected to "Dread Pirate Roberts" by Gary Alford, an Internal Revenue Service investigator working with the Drug Enforcement Administration on the Silk Road case, in mid-2013.

[25] On October 1, 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Ulbricht at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library and accused him of being the "mastermind" behind the site.

[27][28][29] To prevent Ulbricht from encrypting or deleting files on the laptop he was using to run the site as he was arrested, two agents pretended to be engaged in a quarrel to cause a commotion.

[34] Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[29] because they purportedly threatened to reveal the Silk Road enterprise.

[38] Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single related charge, alleging that he contracted to have one of his employees (a former Silk Road moderator) killed.

[40] Prosecutors ultimately moved to drop this indictment as it was lacking in substantive evidence and after his New York conviction on other charges became final.

Ulbricht was also ordered to pay about $183 million in restitution, based on the total sales of illegal drugs and counterfeit IDs through Silk Road.

[57] Oral arguments were heard in October 2016,[58][38][59] and the Second Circuit issued its decision in May 2017, upholding Ulbricht's conviction and sentence in an opinion by Judge Gerard E.

[76] Wired magazine, reporting from a 2024 Bitcoin conference in Nashville, said that clemency for Ulbricht had become a single-issue voting concern among many cryptocurrency supporters.

[77] In the November 2024 issue of Reason magazine, the 2024 Libertarian nominee for president, Chase Oliver, said, "I would like to see [Trump], if he were elected, commute Ross Ulbricht's sentence.

[80][81] On January 21, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump granted Ulbricht a full and unconditional pardon,[9] following a promise at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention.

[85] Ulbricht's family raised money for efforts to release him from prison via the decentralized autonomous organization FreeRossDAO, which accepted donations from the public.

In December 2021, the family auctioned a collection of his writings and artwork as an NFT, which FreeRossDAO bought for 1,442 Ethereum, worth about $6.27 million at the time.