Embattled Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht, might be a free man soon as he recently completed a large part of his release terms. A new discovery from a court file revealed that the founder of the dark web platform reached an agreement last year with prosecutors who asked him to pay $184M as part of the amends for his offense.
A Ransom For Settlement
The prosecutors asked Ulbricht to pay $184M and forget about the billion-dollar worth of crypto seized from him. Part of the filing revealed that the Silk Road founder would forfeit cryptos such as BTC, bch, BTC gold and BTC sv whose combined dollar worth is about $3B.
However, the prosecutors claim that the $184M would be used to pay for Ulbricht’s legal settlement fees and other fees as deem fit by the authorities. “Ulbricht no longer have any right or claims to the 69,371 BTC which he has now given to the us government. The government would do with these cryptos as stipulated by the appropriate law,” the filing concluded.
The efforts of the justice department yielded the confiscation of Ulbricht’s crypto asset. Two years ago, us authorities seized 69K BTC from an attacker who hacked the Silk Road platform before the platform stopped operations. The Silk Road platform was regarded as a place for sale of illegal items such as drugs and ill-gotten financial gains.
Many consider Silk Road as the first dark web platform as it existed for three years (2011 to 2014) when the FBI infiltrated the platform to shut down its operations. Many transactions on the platform were completed using cryptos because of the anonymity that the digital currency offers.
Ulbricht’s Life Sentence Appeal Continues
Following his conviction and subsequent remand in prison seven years ago, Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonment as the founder of the dark web platform. But, he has filed repeated appeals against his life sentence judgement. A wired report states that now that he has agreed to a financial settlement, he is likely to be given slight freedom where he can still earn some cash even though he remains imprisoned.
Wired was the first media outlet to provide this recent update on the Ulbricht case. The media outlet added that the mother of the Silk Road founder (Lyn Ulbricht) stated that this settled agreement was a moral booster for their case in securing freedom for her son. Lyn Ulbricht continues to champion the freedom cause for her embattled son.
She further said, “we are happy that Ross’ unfair financial restriction has been reversed. The settlement gives renewed hope for our fight for his freedom with the dropping of other charges against him.” Nevertheless, there has been massive support for Ulbricht to be free of all charges leveled against him even though he remains in prison.
He sold two of his NFTs for windfall profits. While he used a major portion of the earnings to continue his appeal for freedom, he used the remaining as a philanthropic gesture for other inmates and their families.
James Thompson 
Michael Rafael