Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht to Drop Bitcoin NFT Collection

Ross Ulbricht is releasing a Bitcoin NFT art collection to raise funds for children to visit their imprisoned parents. 

Ross Ulbricht to Release Bitcoin NFTs

Ross Ulbricht will unveil a new tokenized art collection at the upcoming Bitcoin 2022 conference.

The Silk Road founder’s latest art exhibit, dubbed the “Ross Ulbricht Growth Collection,” will include four physical oil paintings, one animation of 318 hand-drawn frames, and five corresponding NFTs stored and secured on the Bitcoin blockchain. “I have put my heart, soul and mind into this collection, and I am really looking forward to unveiling it to you,” said Ulbricht in a Twitter announcement of the drop. 

The Bitcoin NFTs will be minted on Apr. 5 to commemorate Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s birthday, and the collection itself will auctioned off at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami on Apr. 6.

In a blog post, Ulbricht said the money raised will be used to help children visit their parents in prison. “We are moving forward with the idea of helping kids travel to visit their moms and dads in prison,” he wrote in a March 10 blog post on Medium, adding that his team is already reaching out to charities working on similar projects. “The more money we raise, the more good we can do, so I have been busy creating my next art collection.”

Ulbricht is currently serving his ninth year of a double life plus 40-year sentence without the possibility of parole for creating and running the now-defunct online marketplace, Silk Road. The darknet website, which was popularly used to trade illegal drugs and other contraband in exchange for Bitcoin, saw millions of dollars in daily volume before it was seized by the FBI in October 2013. Silk Road helped place Bitcoin under the mainstream spotlight for the first time in its history, and Ulbricht has since become something of a cult figure within the Bitcoin community.  

Ulbricht’s Bitcoin NFT drop follows his first NFT drop on Ethereum, which raised around $6.2 million in an auction at the Art Basel Miami art fair in December.  The winning bid for the collection came from FreeRossDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization launched to pool funds and help free Ulbricht from prison.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.