He Was an Online Drug Lord. Now He’s a Crypto Entrepreneur.
The New York Times
After Blake Benthall was arrested for running Silk Road 2.0, the infamous illegal drug bazaar, things didn’t go the way you might expect.
At a cryptocurrency convention in Austin in May, Blake Emerson Benthall hustled for investor money alongside scores of other entrepreneurs. But none of them, it is safe to say, could pitch their experience as the leader of a multimillion-dollar criminal drug enterprise.
In the convention’s “Deal Flow Zone,” Mr. Benthall, 5-foot-4, cleanshaven and wearing a gray tee with his start-up’s logo, turned his laptop around at a lunch table and began giving his spiel to a bespectacled potential investor.
“I’m a lifelong entrepreneur,” Mr. Benthall said as he clicked through a presentation that detailed how he had run Silk Road 2.0, the second iteration of the infamous online bazaar where 1.7 million anonymous customers signed up and used Bitcoin to buy methamphetamine, heroin and other illegal substances. He recounted his eventual arrest by the F.B.I. and the years he spent in the punitive employ of the federal government.
Now, with his sentence served and probation ended, Mr. Benthall, 36, is promoting a new business: a two-year-old start-up, Fathom(x), which aims to provide businesses and government agencies with software to track digital currency transactions and ensure legal compliance.
Mr. Benthall knows it’s rich for an ex-con to school companies about compliance. But in an industry crawling with hucksters and overnight experts, Mr. Benthall says his criminal experience can help unmask fraud before it leads to another scam like FTX, the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange whose founder is in prison.
While his business is far from proven, his presence at Consensus, the crypto convention, suggested that his decade-long path to legitimacy is close to complete. His story followed some surprising, sometimes baffling twists — from a Christian, home-schooled childhood to running a site that generated $8 million a month in illicit drug sales. Then, to pay for his sins, he spent nearly 10 years secretly helping the government crack down on crypto abuses.
