The quest to discover the true identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto has stalled for years, with sleuths and documentarians alike unable to produce a definitive answer to the $2 trillion mystery.
Now, a prominent crypto industry executive claims to have unearthed previously unrevealed information about Satoshi Nakamoto’s on-chain activity—that may have left a trail to the shadowy coder’s true name.
Conor Grogan, head of product business operations at Coinbase, said this week that he discovered a number of on-chain transactions linked to a Satoshi-controlled wallet that interacted with Cavirtex, a now-defunct centralized BitcoinBitcoin exchange based in Canada.
-There are 24 documented outbound sends from these addresses -The most popular destination address was to 1PYYj -Incredibly, this address received BTC from Cavirtex, a Canadian exchange. I believe this is the first documented onchain between a Satoshi linked wallet and a CEX pic.twitter.com/XNwwhQ3pSz
If true, that fact would signify a major breakthrough in the hunt for Satoshi’s identity. Why? Because the notoriously privacy-prone coder was never previously known to have interacted with centralized crypto exchanges—which, typically, require identity verification from all customers.
If Satoshi really was a Cavirtex customer, the exchange could have collected personally identifiable information, including the developer’s legal name and address—even if, at the time, the Canadian exchange had no clue how important that data from a seemingly ordinary user was.
But Cavirtex is no longer operational. The company was acquired by the American crypto exchange Kraken in 2016 and absorbed into its infrastructure.
So did Kraken inherit information during that merger that could answer one of the biggest questions in modern tech history?
It’s been an eventful month for longtime Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, who was recently accused of being pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary.
Despite vigorously denying the claims, both on-camera, and off, Todd told Decrypt on Friday that being publicly branded as the elusive genius sitting on $74.4 billion worth of Bitcoin has forced him to go even further to defend himself.
“I have taken some security measures,” Todd said. “But it’s not a good idea to sa...
That depends. It’s unclear if Cavirtex operated under mandatory know-your-customer requirements, or KYCKYC, for all customers at the time Satoshi may have interacted with the exchange—or if Kraken retained Cavirtex’s KYC data post-acquisition. A Kraken representative did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on the matter.
It does appear, however, that as early as December 2013—when Coinbase’s Grogan says Satoshi received Bitcoin from Cavirtex—the Canadian exchange was already making a point of enforcing KYC for all customers. Back then, when crypto was still an incredibly young and fringe sector, several Bitcoin exchanges skirted such requirements.
But apparently not Cavirtex.
Around the same time as Satoshi’s purported Cavirtex transaction, a popular online Bitcoin forum described the exchange as one that enforced “stricter KYC policies,” similar in robustness to the likes of Coinbase and Kraken.
Only in June 2014—about six months after Satoshi reportedly interacted with Cavirtex—was Canadian law amended to require crypto exchanges to collect identifying information from its customers.
"Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery," HBO’s latest documentary, aired and hit the Max streaming service Tuesday night, promising to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin.
The documentary, directed by Cullen Hoback, explores Bitcoin’s origins and introduces several figures from the early days of its development, including Blockstream CEO Adam Back.
Hoback ultimately zeroes in on Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, presenting a series of clues suggesting that he could be the c...
But Cavirtex appears to have already been performing such checks on users. The same week Canada passed that crypto regulation, the exchange declared it was already maintaining a “proactive” KYC policy.
If the exchange did in fact collect identifying information from Satoshi, it's possible then that Kraken inherited that data and still possesses it.
The exchange has only so far engaged with Grogan’s claims about Satoshi somewhat cheekily. When Grogan posted his findings about the Bitcoin creator on Wednesday, Kraken’s X account responded nebulously: “We are all Satoshi.”
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Coinbase’s Layer 2 network Base’s creator, Jesse Pollak, has defended the platform’s focus on creators, following backlash over an experimental content token drop.
“If you are a creator or developer and you want to be the #1 priority, we would love to have you on Base,” Pollak tweeted Monday.
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