Odaily News Although a pardon can cancel property forfeiture, most of the bitcoin held by now-released Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht has already been sold and the proceeds spent, according to Renato Mariotti, a former U.S. federal prosecutor now in the white collar defense department at the Paul Hastings law firm.
After a jury convicted Ulbricht of drug trafficking and money laundering, the judge also ordered him to forfeit nearly $184 million. To satisfy the verdict, the U.S. Marshals Service arranged a series of auctions to sell more than 144,000 bitcoins owned by Ulbricht.
In a bad move, the marshals sold the bitcoins in early 2014, just as the price of bitcoin had fallen from over $1,000 to a low of nearly $300. Today, those 144,000 bitcoins would be worth about $14 billion, but the sale price was just over $48 million, or about $334 per coin, less than 0.5% of their current value.
That doesn’t mean Ulbricht, 40, is now penniless. With the help of his mother, he maintained an active social media presence during his incarceration and sold artwork and NFTs, making millions of dollars, although his family planned to use the funds for legal fees at the time.
It is also possible (although there is no evidence to support this) that Ulbricht had other Bitcoin wallets that the FBI did not find when they arrested him.
Fortune sent an email to the address published on the Ulbricht family's Free Ross page asking if Ulbricht had additional bitcoins or if he planned to file a legal action to overturn the forfeiture, but did not receive a response.
It is understood that the FBI wallet that once stored more than 144,000 bitcoins of Ulbricht currently holds only slightly more than 1 bitcoin, with a balance of about $129,000. It is not clear what will happen to these funds.
Yesterday, Conor Grogan, director of Coinbase, posted on the X platform that he found about 430 BTC in dozens of wallets related to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road. These wallets were not confiscated by the US government and have not been moved for more than 13 years. At that time, these addresses may have been just "dust wallets" (referring to wallets with too little money to be taken care of). Now they are worth about 47 million US dollars in total. If Ross Ulbricht can still find the private key, he may be able to recover this part of the assets.