The co-founder and CEO of Canadian crypto company Blockstream may be the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, at least according to a thorough new New York Times investigation.
The article, published Wednesday morning, identifies the likely Bitcoin founder as Adam Back, a British-born computer scientist and cryptographer. Back has repeatedly dismissed speculation that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the creator of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Back is the inventor of Hashcash and was part of the early “Cypherpunk” community whose ideas laid much of the technical foundation for Bitcoin.
Back is the inventor of Hashcash, a system used in the Bitcoin mining algorithm, and was part of the early “Cypherpunk” community whose ideas laid much of the technical foundation for Bitcoin. In 2014, he co-founded Blockstream, which positions itself as a leader in infrastructure technology powered by Bitcoin. Its flagship product, the Liquid network, enables decentralized trading, such as trustless Bitcoin swap settlements and asset tokenization. The company is headquartered in Victoria, BC, though some sources list Montréal as its main office.
Blockstream has raised over $822 million CAD in funding and gained unicorn status in 2021 when it was valued at $4-billion USD ($5.5 billion CAD) as of its Series B round. Notorious financier Jeffrey Epstein invested $500,000 USD in Blockstream’s seed round, though Back has publicly said Epstein’s firm later divested from the company the same year.
According to New York Times journalists John Carreyrou and Dylan Freedman, Back is the likeliest candidate to be the true Satoshi Nakamoto. Their investigation relied on multiple in-person interviews and detailed writing style analyses (powered in part by AI) that compared Back’s early public writings with Nakamoto’s, who largely disappeared online in 2010.
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Back denied that he is Nakamoto in an X post this morning, adding that he was an early advocate for the “positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash.”
He added that he doesn’t know Nakamoto’s true identity, which he said was good for Bitcoin because it helps the cryptocurrency “be viewed [as] a new asset class” and a “mathematically scarce digital commodity.” BetaKit has reached out to Blockstream and Adam Back for comment.
Bitcoin, the world’s first and largest decentralized cryptocurrency, was invented in 2008 when an unknown individual going by “Satoshi Nakamoto” published a white paper. Over the years, multiple investigations have claimed to unmask Nakamoto’s true identity—from Canadian computer scientist Peter Todd, according to a 2024 HBO documentary, to Dorian Nakamoto, a California resident, according to a later-discredited Newsweek story in 2014.
Back was appointed CEO of Blockstream in 2016 after co-founder Austin Hill stepped down. Back’s Canadian connections don’t stop there: according to the New York Times article, Back worked at a Montréal privacy software startup in 1999, where he helped build the Freedom Network for private, anonymous internet browsing.
Feature image courtesy Blockstream.