Virgil Griffith, a former Ethereum developer imprisoned for attending a cryptographic conference in North Korea in 2019, was released from prison and addresses a house halfway, according to his lawyer, Alexander Urbelis.
Urbelis, general advisor of the Ethereum name service, who has also been serving as a Griffith external lawyer, published a photo of the recently released Griffith and his parents on X on Wednesday, in front of FCI Milan, the prison of Michigan of low security where Griffith served a part of his 56 -month sentence.
“I am very happy to inform that Virgil is out!” Urbelis wrote. “Happy day of fact.”
Griffith was arrested in November 2019, seven months after returning from the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, where he had attended a cryptographic conference. While I was at the conference, Griffith made a presentation on Ethereum and explained how cryptocurrency could be used to evade sanctions against the country. Although he initially fought against the position, Griffith declared himself guilty of a conspiracy charge to violate international sanctions in 2021.
The New York judge supervised the case sentenced him to a fine of $ 100,000 and 63 months, or just over five years, prison, a fraction of the possible 20 -year sentence he faced if he went to trial and lost. Last year, Griffith’s lawyers were able to reduce their sentence to 56 months, citing their criminal status for the first time.
Griffith has been imprisoned since mid -2011. Although he was initially released on bail after his arrest, a judge sent him back to jail in New York to wait for the trial after violating his bail conditions when trying to access one of his cryptocurrency accounts to pay his lawyers.
Urbelis told Coendesk that Griffith’s legal team has the hope that half on the way to Baltimore will soon be transferred to housing confinement.
“But the long -term consequences persist: Virgil will have to endure onerous probation for several years, whose conditions are not yet known,” Urbelis said. “And in addition to that, the Department of Commerce imposed severe export restrictions to Virgil that will extend until 2032 and that would make its life very difficult difficult.”
The restrictions of the Commerce Department prohibit Griffith from participating directly or indirectly in any transaction that involves software or technology that will be exported from the US. UU., Urbelis said, which makes the return to work in the cryptographic industry difficult, if not impossible.
Griffith is looking for a forgiveness from the administration of President Donald Trump, which Urbelis said it was a “continuous process” in which they had made “great progress.”
“We are looking for a forgiveness to bring justice to a prosecution that we believe was bad and fundamentally not American from the beginning, to improve Virgil’s life and to make sure Virgil has [the] Ability to contribute to a world that needs so desperately thinkers and makers like him, ”said Urbelis.
Trump has forgiven several people convicted of criminal charges related to crypto, including the founder of the Silk route, Ross Ulbricht, and the former CEO of Bitmex, Arthur Hayes, and three people convicted of violating the Bank Secretation Law (BSA). Even more condemned cryptographic, including former CEO and FTX scammer, Sam Bankman-Fried, have hope of their own pardons.
