Silk Road
2011–2013 darknet market most known for the sale of illegal drugs
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| January 21 2025 | Ulbricht received a full pardon from President Donald Trump after serving 11 years and 3 months of his sentence. |
| 2021 | Film 'Silk Road' released, starring Jason Clarke and Nick Robinson, portraying the story of Ross Ulbricht and the online marketplace. |
| November 3 2020 | Bitcoin transactions totaling 69,370 bitcoin and bitcoin cash, worth approximately $1 billion, were detected from a Silk Road-associated bitcoin address. The U.S. government later revealed these were part of a civil forfeiture action, originally acquired by a hacker identified as 'Individual X'. |
| 2018 | A&E Television releases documentary 'Silk Road: Drugs, Death, and the Dark Web'. |
| February 10 2018 | Casefile True Crime Podcast begins airing a multi-part series about Silk Road, covering the story in detail (Part 1 aired on February 10). |
| May 31 2017 | The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied Ulbricht's appeal and affirmed his conviction and life sentence. |
| 2015 | Documentary film 'Deep Web' by Alex Winter released, providing an inside story about the arrest of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road marketplace. |
| May 29 2015 | Ulbricht was sentenced to five concurrent sentences, including two life imprisonments without parole, and ordered to forfeit $183 million. |
| February 4 2015 | Ulbricht was convicted by a jury on seven charges, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. |
| January 2015 | Silk Road Reloaded launched on I2P with multiple cryptocurrency support, attempting to continue the Silk Road marketplace legacy. |
| January 13 2015 | Ulbricht's trial began in federal court in Manhattan. He admitted to founding Silk Road but claimed to have transferred control of the site to others. |
| 2014 | Silk Road 2.0 is shut down as part of Operation Onymous. |
| November 6 2014 | Blake Benthall (using the pseudonym 'Defcon') was arrested by FBI, Europol, and Eurojust in San Francisco as part of Operation Onymous. Thomas White, the English creator of the relaunched website, was also arrested (though this was not made public until 2019). |
| June 27 2014 | The U.S. Marshals Service sold 29,657 bitcoins in 10 blocks at an online auction, estimated to be worth $18 million. Tim Draper purchased the bitcoins to lend to a bitcoin start-up called Vaurum. |
| February 13 2014 | Defcon announced that Silk Road 2.0's escrow accounts were compromised through a Bitcoin protocol vulnerability, with $2.7 million in bitcoins reportedly stolen. |
| December 20 2013 | Three alleged Silk Road 2.0 administrators were arrested, including Andrew Michael Jones and Gary Davis (known as 'Inigo' and 'Libertas'). The new Dread Pirate Roberts surrendered control of the site and froze its activity. |
| November 6 2013 | Administrators from the closed original Silk Road relaunched the site as Silk Road 2.0, led by a new pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts, promising improved security and distributing encrypted copies of the site's source code. |
| October 2013 | The FBI initially seized 26,000 bitcoins from Silk Road accounts, worth approximately $3.6 million. By the end of the month, they reported seizing 144,000 bitcoins worth $28.5 million. |
| October 1 2013 | Ross Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco's Glen Park Library by the FBI. During the arrest, the FBI seized Ulbricht's laptop used to manage the Silk Road marketplace. |
| February 2013 | Silk Road facilitates sales of 9,519,664 bitcoins between February 2011 and July 2013. |
| 2011 | Ross Ulbricht launches Silk Road, the first modern darknet market, operating as a hidden service on the Tor network and using bitcoin for anonymous transactions. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia article Silk Road (marketplace), which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.