Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht has been found guilty of running the multi-million dollar dark net drugs marketplace.
The 30-year-old was convicted on all seven counts he faced by a federal jury that took little more than three hours to reach a verdict on Wednesday.
Ulbricht was charged with drug trafficking, conspiracies to commit money laundering and computer hacking, and other offences.
He faces up to life in prison.
Ulbricht's three-week trial heard how he amassed a fortune of $18m (€15.86m) from the underground website, which was used to conduct more than one million drug deals over three years.
His defence claimed he was a naive fall-guy who passed the site to a mysterious criminal when it got out of hand.
But the prosecution poured scorn on the claim, saying "there were no little elves" who placed the evidence on Ulbricht's computer.
The jury agreed, dismissing an attempt by defence lawyer Joshua Dratel to paint his client as a "man with a lot of ideas" who simply wanted to carry out an economic experiment.
During the trial, jurors heard that Ulbricht tried to commission a hitman after blackmailers threatened to expose the operation unless they were paid off.
In one online message Ulbricht sent to a contract killer, he said: "I would like to put a bounty on their head if it's not too much trouble for you."
FBI agents first started investigating the site after drug-filled envelopes were discovered at Chicago's O'Hare airport in 2011.
They tracked the username used by the person running the site - Dread Pirate Roberts - but two years later they still had no idea who he was.
That was until a tip-off from the Internal Revenue Service pointed to Ulbricht. At that point, a plan was put into place to confirm their suspicions.
Agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan, who had covertly taken over the Silk Road account of a trusted user who had been arrested, encouraged Ulbricht to log on at a public library in October 2013, while plainclothes agents milled around.
At the moment Dread Pirate Roberts was flagged as "available" online, they moved in and arrested Ulbricht and seized his laptop.
The website was then shut down.
