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  4. The jailed founder of The Silk Road dark web marketplace is minting NFTs for charity — and a DAO has been formed to buy them and protest his imprisonment

The jailed founder of The Silk Road dark web marketplace is minting NFTs for charity — and a DAO has been formed to buy them and protest his imprisonment

Carla Mozée   

The jailed founder of The Silk Road dark web marketplace is minting NFTs for charity — and a DAO has been formed to buy them and protest his imprisonment
  • Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for running the Silk Road black-market website, is auctioning NFTs for charity.
  • Ether-based bidding for the Ross Ulbricht Genesis Collection has already reached about $1.8 million, BlockWorks reported.

Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for running the black-market website Silk Road, is auctioning NFTs for charity, and a group seeking his freedom plans to bid on his creations, according to a BlockWorks report this week.

Bidding on 10 non-fungible tokens created by Ulbricht will run on the SuperRare platform through Wednesday. The auction's high bid as of late Friday was 420.69 ether, or around $1.8 million based on ether's price of roughly $4,233.

The Ross Ulbricht Genesis Collection includes NFTs of graphite pencil drawings and poetry, spanning works he produced in his early childhood as well as his time in prison.

Ulbricht, who was arrested in 2013 and sentenced in 2015, recalled in a blog post this week that he learned about NFTs after being told he should sell his art through the digital format.

"I was able to connect to those of you in the free world through my art. The isolation I felt was tempered by it," he wrote.

Proceeds from the NFT auction will be donated to charity and specifically for "helping the incarcerated," Ulbricht's mother, Lyn Ulbricht, said on Twitter recently, according to BlockWorks.

Silk Road was shut down in 2013 after gaining notoriety as an online drug marketplace that settled transactions in bitcoin.

Meanwhile, a group of crypto investors has created the FreeRossDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization aimed at gathering funds to buy the Genesis Collection and protest what it sees as injustices of the American prison system.

Freeing Ulbricht from his prison sentence is at the top of DOA's efforts, and the treasury's balance as of late Friday was 962.192 ether, or more than $4 million.

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