According to PANews, Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, has regained his freedom but not his lost fortune. In 2013, the FBI seized 144,000 bitcoins from Ulbricht, which were later auctioned by the U.S. Marshals Service in 2014. The timing of the auction was unfortunate, as the bitcoins were sold when the price had plummeted from over $1,000 to around $300. Today, those bitcoins are valued at approximately $14 billion, but they were sold for just over $48 million at the time, equating to about $334 per bitcoin, less than 0.5% of their current value.
Ulbricht legally challenged the seizure but eventually abandoned his claims in 2017. One of the auction's biggest beneficiaries was venture capitalist Tim Draper, who acquired about 30,000 bitcoins. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice has continued to pursue other cryptocurrency seizures related to Silk Road. This includes confiscating and selling bitcoins stolen by corrupt federal agents during the initial investigation and recently obtaining a court order to sell thousands of bitcoins seized from an anonymous hacker who also robbed Ulbricht.