From Internet Drug Kingpin to Crypto Pioneer: The Redemption and Rebirth of a Dark Web King
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From Internet Drug Kingpin to Crypto Pioneer: The Redemption and Rebirth of a Dark Web King
36-year-old Ben Sauer is working to promote Fathom(x), the new company he founded two years ago.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsSource: The New York Times
Translation: BitpushNews Yanan
Blake Benthall, the controversial figure once imprisoned for running the notorious illegal drug marketplace Silk Road 2.0, has taken a life path far removed from public expectation. This past May, at a cryptocurrency conference in Austin, he stood among entrepreneurs pitching their startups to investors. Yet no one else in the crowd could boast of having led a multimillion-dollar narcotics platform as a selling point.
At the event’s exhibition area, Benthall wore a gray T-shirt emblazoned with his startup’s logo, his face clean-shaven and neatly groomed. He smoothly spun his laptop around with a confident smile, beginning to tell his story to a potential investor.
"I'm a lifelong entrepreneur," Benthall said proudly, launching into a presentation detailing how he operated the controversial Silk Road 2.0 website—the upgraded version of Silk Road, which attracted 1.7 million anonymous users who bought methamphetamine, heroin, and other illicit drugs using Bitcoin. He openly discussed his eventual arrest by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the difficult years he spent in federal prison.
Now, with his sentence served and probation completed, the 36-year-old Benthall is promoting Fathom(x), the company he founded two years ago. The firm specializes in software that helps businesses and government agencies track cryptocurrency transactions to ensure legal compliance.
Benthall acknowledges it may sound ironic for someone with a criminal record to teach companies about compliance. But in an industry rife with fraudsters and overnight experts, he believes his criminal past is actually a unique asset. He argues this experience can help expose crypto fraud and prevent disasters like FTX—a now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange whose founder is now behind bars—from happening again.
While Benthall's business remains unproven, his presence at the Consensus crypto conference marks a near-full-circle journey toward legitimacy in the crypto world after a decade-long odyssey. His story is full of astonishing twists: from a childhood shaped by Christian homeschooling, to operating a website with $8 million in monthly illegal drug sales, to nearly ten years spent secretly assisting the government in combating cryptocurrency crime.
His transformation mirrors that of Bitcoin itself: evolving from a speculative digital currency tied to dark web crime into a Wall Street-recognized investment asset. Even former government investigators once skeptical of cryptocurrency have become passionate advocates. Vincent D’Agostino, a former FBI agent involved in the Silk Road case, even invested in Benthall’s startup—an endorsement that speaks volumes about Benthall’s own transformation.
Back when Benthall was arrested, Consensus was merely a small industry gathering of 500 tech enthusiasts discussing Bitcoin and blockchain. Today, it has grown into a massive expo drawing over 15,000 attendees, showcasing dozens of cryptocurrencies and startups. At this festival of innovation, venture capitalists roam freely, hunting for rich returns and endless possibilities in an ever-evolving industry.
As Benthall wrapped up his pitch and gently closed his laptop, one investor immediately decided to invest $150,000 in his company.
From Homeschooled Boy to Online Drug Kingpin
Tracing back Benthall’s upbringing, he grew up in Houston as an only child. His parents, devout Christians, chose to homeschool him. Sharon Benthall, a respected community college teacher, described her son as “reserved, cautious, and very intelligent.” His father Larry, a seasoned software manager, introduced young Blake to the vast world of desktop computing early on—this machine quietly became Blake’s bridge to the outside world.
At age seven, Blake already showed flashes of creativity, building custom websites for his toy dolls. By 14, the teenager co-founded an online gaming hosting company with a peer he met on AOL Instant Messenger. With fearless enthusiasm, he used his mother’s PayPal account to order a computer server delivered straight to their doorstep, promising to repay her with subscription fees from his customers.
“Looking back now, there were signs,” Benthall’s mother recalled.
His parents say they tried hard to guide their son’s internet use, but the young Benthall was deeply immersed in the virtual world. Online, he found friendships and thrills missing from church and Boy Scouts.
After briefly attending Florida College, a small Christian school near Tampa, Benthall moved to San Francisco in 2009, driven by a passion for technology. He landed a job at a startup developing a screen-time management app for parents. But the product shut down just four months later.
Thereafter, Benthall bounced between the Bay Area and Florida, frequently changing jobs while spending most of his free time online. One area particularly captivated him: Bitcoin. This then-$130 cryptocurrency allowed anonymous online transactions. In 2013, he stumbled upon an interview with a mysterious figure calling himself "Dread Pirate Roberts," operator of a site called Silk Road—a darknet market primarily for selling illegal drugs, relying on Bitcoin and Tor (a privacy software masking users' identities) to evade law enforcement.
Benthall became fascinated by Tor’s concept—he wanted to browse the internet without leaving any trace linking activity to his device. Without hesitation, he downloaded Tor.
One October afternoon in 2013, while working out at an Equinox gym in downtown San Francisco, Benthall saw breaking news flash across the TV above: law enforcement had taken down the Silk Road website and arrested its operator, Dread Pirate Roberts—later revealed to be Ross Ulbricht.
The 29-year-old Ulbricht, also from Texas, lived in San Francisco—and shockingly, was arrested near Benthall’s home in the Mission District.
Though Benthall never used drugs or visited Silk Road, learning that authorities had seized 26,000 Bitcoins sparked a powerful urge. He cut his workout short and rushed home, diving into dark web forums.
Although the FBI had shut down Silk Road, its forums remained active. Some users panicked; others began discussing how to launch new drug markets to fill the void. Knowing these conversations might vanish, Benthall quickly wrote a program to archive every post—preserving what felt like a vanishing history.
It was against this backdrop that Benthall’s new venture quietly took root. A Silk Road moderator noticed someone archiving forum data and grew curious. When Benthall revealed himself via an anonymous chat app, the moderator asked technical questions and ultimately offered him 50,000 dollars worth of Bitcoin to build a new site.
Building an illegal drug marketplace under government scrutiny was clearly risky and unwise. But Benthall faced financial strain and had failed to land a job at SpaceX. He reassured himself it was temporary coding work—low risk, he thought.
“At 25, I didn’t understand conspiracy charges,” he recalled. “I thought I could stay an anonymous backend developer—felt manageable.”
He gave little thought to the crimes his website might enable or the harms of unrestricted drug access. He believed in Dread Pirate Roberts’ libertarian view: Silk Road’s user rating system reduced risks in drug transactions. With this conviction, he stepped onto a dangerous, uncertain path.
He poured three weeks of effort into creating Silk Road 2.0, which quietly launched just one month after Ulbricht’s arrest.
Benthall originally intended to walk away—but the moderator who hired him made a tempting offer: if he continued managing the site’s servers, he could take half the profits.
“Of course I knew it was illegal,” Benthall admitted. “But on day one, we got 100,000 sign-ups. It felt amazing—I finally saw people using something I built.”
Just then, he received an offer from SpaceX to become a flight software engineer. Though the salary wasn’t high and required weekly commutes from the Bay Area to the company’s Southern California headquarters, he accepted immediately—it was his “dream job.” Thus began his double life.
Double Life
Silk Road 2.0 rapidly expanded, but Benthall’s partner (later confirmed to be a 19-year-old living in the UK) wanted out. Benthall had to choose between shutting down the market or running it alone.
“I became the sole boss,” Benthall recalled. “Overnight, I was running the world’s largest drug-selling website.”
The job kept him awake at night and unfocused during the day. Once, he even napped inside a mock-up of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
Nighttime brought wealth accumulation. Silk Road 2.0 charged about 8% commission per transaction, earning him up to $500,000 monthly. Part of this income went to pay anonymous users for customer support services.
In January 2014, he splurged $127,000 in Bitcoin on a Tesla Model S, indulging in the luxuries money brought. He flew on turboprop planes to Lake Tahoe, attended Coachella, and shared Instagram posts of breathtaking views from boats—showcasing his extraordinary life.
Yet he remained vigilant, never bringing the laptop containing his darknet life into SpaceX, fearing company security would uncover his secret. One February day, while busy at SpaceX, Silk Road 2.0 suffered a hacker attack, losing about $2.7 million in Bitcoin. In the company cafeteria, he overheard a colleague mocking the incident: “Can you believe the idiot who restarted this stupid site?”
Soon after, SpaceX fired Benthall for poor performance, allowing him to fully dedicate himself to his illegal enterprise. The site publicly declared he wouldn’t profit until customers were fully reimbursed.
As user loyalty deepened, so did Benthall’s trust in his anonymous customer service team. Despite hacker attacks, heavy workload, and fear of legal consequences, he felt responsible for keeping the site running—unable to let go easily.
Yet he never imagined the hammer of justice was closer than he thought.
Crisis Arrives
Among the anonymous customer service staff Benthall hired was Jared Der-Yeghiayan, an undercover agent from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Der-Yeghiayan had previously worked on the original Silk Road investigation, posing as a helpful community moderator to gain Ulbricht’s trust. Now, he repeated the tactic.
The agent only knew Benthall by his alias Defcon and was deeply impressed by Defcon’s technical skills.
Der-Yeghiayan spent months analyzing Silk Road 2.0, but the real breakthrough came from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. They developed a method to reveal the hidden locations of Tor-protected darknet servers. Federal authorities used their findings to link Benthall’s name to the server hosting Silk Road 2.0.
Investigators discovered Benthall’s previous job was at SpaceX and initially suspected identity theft. Gary Alford, the IRS agent leading the case, joked they were chasing “a rocket scientist” running the site.
They surveilled Benthall for five months to gather more evidence. Then, one November afternoon in 2014, as Benthall drove his Tesla away from home, three vehicles surrounded him. Federal agents appeared and arrested him.
Der-Yeghiayan and FBI agent Vincent D’Agostino from New York, both veterans of the Silk Road case, escorted Benthall home, handcuffed him to a bed, and began searching.
During months of surveillance, D’Agostino felt he understood Benthall well. He read his forum posts, followed his tweets, watched his college band performances on YouTube. Having handled many organized crime cases, he didn’t see Benthall as a hardened criminal.
Investigators also viewed Benthall differently from Ulbricht. Ulbricht, a radical libertarian distrustful of authority, was accused of hiring hitmen to kill five people he feared would expose him (though none died) and ultimately received a life sentence for drug trafficking (Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently said he’d pardon him if elected).
By contrast, Benthall didn’t seem dangerous. “His main interest seemed to be ‘making the website better,’” D’Agostino said.
“Sometimes developers get so focused on building something, they overlook broader societal implications,” D’Agostino said. “The pure joy of development excites them.” He believed these skills could benefit the government.
Inside Benthall’s apartment, D’Agostino and Der-Yeghiayan told him they knew he was Defcon and showed him chat logs he thought were long deleted. They informed Benthall they had searched his parents’ home in Houston and urged him to cooperate.
Benthall realized he was in deep trouble. “I needed them to believe I wasn’t a monster,” he recalled. After a moment of prayer, he agreed to hand over the site’s digital keys and Bitcoin wallets. Past midnight, he huddled with investigators in his bedroom, explaining how Silk Road 2.0 worked. Though he couldn’t name users or operators, he created a tool to extract the data investigators needed.
“He immediately showed remorse,” Der-Yeghiayan said. “I think he was sincere.”
Cooperation with the Federal Government
After federal prosecutor Katie Haun denied bail, Benthall spent his first nights post-arrest in an Oakland jail. At a hearing, a judge warned he faced at least ten years in prison. He was then transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Queens, New York, awaiting trial.
Weeks later, D’Agostino took Benthall out of detention to an FBI office near Chinatown—a windowless interrogation room. Handcuffed to a desk, a laptop placed before him, Benthall typed one-handed, responding to each request.
“This was the most stressful hackathon of my life,” Benthall recalled—yet he recognized a rare opportunity.
The government’s takedown of Silk Road 2.0 marked the first major seizure of dozens of darknet markets. As D’Agostino put it, the FBI was “drowning in data” and urgently needed technically skilled individuals to analyze it.
With approval from federal prosecutors, investigators began negotiating cooperation terms with Benthall’s lawyer, Jean-Jacques Cabou. If Benthall assisted the government, the judge might show leniency later. “Most of the time, the government can’t hire someone like this,” Der-Yeghiayan said.
Negotiations progressed quickly. Soon, Benthall was left alone in a locked FBI interrogation room to work—handcuffs removed, though still escorted to the restroom.
One day, D’Agostino handed him a polo shirt, signaling him to change out of his blue prison clothes. They drove to a Queens shopping mall, sat in the food court, each working on laptops. D’Agostino even gave the inmate a $5 bill, letting him move freely through the food court. FBI agents watched Benthall like “a child”—when he returned with coffee, one agent asked for change.
“Your goal is to slowly build a relationship with this person so we can trust him more and get more information,” D’Agostino explained.
In July 2015, Benthall pleaded guilty to four charges including drug trafficking and money laundering, signing a cooperation agreement committing to assist the government. Eight months into his sentence, he was allowed to move into an apartment in Queens, becoming a full-time cybercrime consultant—wearing an ankle monitor, paid in freedom and a modest stipend covering essentials like dollar pizza slices, toothpaste, and subway fares.
Benthall helped investigate large-scale corporate hacks, traced Bitcoin transactions to identify criminals, and even received training at the FBI’s Quantico, Virginia headquarters. “The U.S. government holds vast amounts of cryptocurrency—ensuring its security is genuinely concerning,” he said.
Benthall felt lucky—his skills matched exactly what the government needed at that moment. But Brian Farrell disagreed. Incarcerated under the alias DoctorClu—one of Benthall’s hired moderators—he served six years and believed it fundamentally unfair that he, a “minor player,” received a harsher sentence.
Benthall typically avoids discussing specifics of his government work. In the past, he mentioned only one case: helping identify someone threatening to blow up a New York City school unless paid a Bitcoin ransom, by tracing the attacker’s crypto wallet address. (The FBI declined to comment, stating: “No public documents detail Benthall’s actions.”)
This semi-free state made him paranoid. “Once you’re monitored by the state, your worldview changes completely,” he said. He constantly felt watched and feared being recognized by angry Silk Road 2.0 customers. He also enrolled in government-funded psychological counseling.
Still, he gradually resumed normal life. He sang and played guitar at outdoor karaoke events, re-engaged with church, and made new friends. But he stayed silent about his past—everyone knew him only by his middle name, Emerson.
Michael White, director of the East Village’s “City Light Church” at the time, recalled: “Since I’m a pastor, people usually open up to me. But this guy—I only knew him as Emerson, nothing else.”
A New Beginning?
Over the next five years, Benthall worked alongside agents who once investigated Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0. But over time, these government employees left for private-sector opportunities. Especially as Bitcoin gained mainstream traction and surpassed $10,000, many entered the crypto industry.
The most notable shift was Haun herself—the federal prosecutor who once opposed Benthall’s bail. In 2018, she joined venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on crypto investments, and within four years raised a $1.5 billion fund.
D’Agostino’s journey was equally representative. Initially skeptical of Bitcoin, he gradually shifted, convinced it would “change the world.” He installed Bitcoin mining software at home and eventually left the FBI for a private security firm specializing in ransomware attacks. Der-Yeghiayan joined blockchain analytics company Chainalysis.
As investigators around him departed, Benthall began contemplating his future. Though effectively on bail, he remained un-sentenced, with no clear release date.
Daniel Richman, Columbia Law professor and former prosecutor, said such arrangements, while unusual, do occur when someone’s “culpability warrants prosecution but poses no substantial risk while released.”
“It sounds somewhat like indentured servitude,” Richman added, “but ultimately, such arrangements can benefit both sides.”
The pandemic offered Benthall a potential escape. In early 2020, as offices emptied, he petitioned the judge to live and work at his parents’ home in Houston.
The following spring, Benthall felt the time had come and formally requested sentencing. In March 2021, he flew to Manhattan with his parents for the hearing.
Wearing a suit and ill-fitting dress shoes, Benthall finally received the outcome he hoped for: three years of probation—during which he must continue unpaid work for the government as needed. The decision was not publicized, and Benthall remained tight-lipped to protect this fragile arrangement.
Still, his criminal record made job hunting extremely difficult. He needed to repay his parents for retirement funds spent on legal fees, increasing financial pressure. Meanwhile, during his cooperation period, he became a father.
After three job offers were rescinded, Benthall decided in spring 2022 to take a leap—founding Fathom(x). He admitted it fulfilled his lifelong dream of “starting a legitimate business.”
Fathom(x)’s mission is simple: verify whether companies truly own the cryptocurrencies they claim and ensure their legitimacy. Benthall believes his years of government work bolster credibility. More heartening still, he convinced D’Agostino—the very agent who arrested him—to invest in Fathom(x). “I made the agent who arrested me believe in me,” Benthall said proudly.
Since D’Agostino left the FBI, they’ve stayed in touch. When Benthall lived in New York, D’Agostino invited him to backyard barbecues and karaoke nights.
When starting the company, Benthall called D’Agostino for advice. The former FBI agent agreed to invest. “He’s not the same person I arrested ten years ago,” D’Agostino said.
Professor Richman, however, expressed unease about the investment. “I don’t like the idea that when you work closely with someone as an agent, that person could become your business partner—even slightly,” he said.
D’Agostino wasn’t the only former “colleague” Benthall encountered in his new life. He pitched his software to government agencies including the IRS—where Alford, the Silk Road investigator, still works.
“Life is full of strange twists,” Alford mused during a recent reflection, recalling a video call where Benthall demonstrated his software to him and other IRS agents. While felony convictions aren’t explicitly barred from federal employment, John Pelissero, a government ethics expert at Santa Clara University, expressed surprise that Benthall wasn’t placed on a “do not hire” list at sentencing. Whether the IRS currently uses Fathom(x), Alford declined to say.
Benthall remains tight-lipped about how much funding his company has raised. Though Fathom(x) is small—just two contract workers—he insists it is already profitable.
Meanwhile, he’s begun deeply reflecting on the harm his former drug-selling website may have caused society. While living in New York, the death of a new friend—who overdosed—deeply affected him. It reinforced his belief that given Silk Road’s massive user base, some must have suffered due to drugs purchased on the site.
As he embarks on his journey through crypto conferences, Benthall habitually uses his middle name when ordering coffee—perhaps out of habit, perhaps because he’s still figuring out how to confront his past. He imagines that once he starts using his full name, victims might come forward to confront him directly.
“I completely understand their feelings and respect their rights,” he said candidly. “So I’m mentally preparing for those difficult conversations ahead.”
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