Short answers, pulled from the story.
Silk Road was founded by Ross Ulbricht, an American, and launched in February 2011. Ulbricht operated the site under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to the fictional character from The Princess Bride.
The FBI shut down Silk Road in October 2013 and arrested Ross Ulbricht on the 1st of October 2013 at the Glen Park Library in San Francisco. The arrest followed research by IRS Criminal Investigation Special Agent Gary Alford, who traced early online references to the site back to Ulbricht's personal email address.
On the 29th of May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to five concurrent terms including two life sentences without the possibility of parole. He was also ordered to forfeit $183 million. He received a full pardon from President Donald Trump on the 21st of January 2025, after eleven years and three months of incarceration.
Silk Road generated revenue equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion based on the value of bitcoin at the time of transactions, with approximately 9,519,664 bitcoins processed in total. The marketplace also collected 614,305 bitcoins in commissions, worth approximately $80 million by some estimates.
According to government data, Silk Road served 146,946 buyers and 3,877 vendors. Thirty percent of registered users identified as being from the United States, with additional users from the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, France, Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands.
Silk Road 2.0 launched on the 6th of November 2013 but was shut down in November 2014 as part of Operation Onymous. Its operator, Blake Benthall, was arrested in San Francisco. Earlier, in February 2014, hackers exploited a bitcoin vulnerability to steal $2.7 million from the site's escrow accounts.