Jack Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto, Matthew Sigel of VanEck claims

On Feb. 18, 2025, Head of Digital Assets Research at VanEck, Matthew Sigel, published a long post on X, claiming that he is convinced Jack Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto. Sigel backed his claim with a body of evidence compiled by an entrepreneur, Sean Murray.

Disregarding the fact that many Bitcoin supporters attribute part of its perfection to the total absence of the leader, the search for enigmatic Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto continues.

Sigel points out that the arguments he is bringing need better revision, and he urges everyone to participate. Here is what he is saying.

The evidence linking Jack to Satoshi is a combination of technical parallels, circumstantial links, patterns (including timing), uncanny coincidences, motive, and ability. While not definitive, the breadth of these connections is compelling and worthy of further scrutiny.

Murray, whose work is linked by Sigel, published his findings in 2024. However, the first rumors of the possibility of Jack being the Bitcoin inventor started to circulate even earlier. For instance, Dorsey denied he is Satoshi Nakamoto during the Lex Fridman podcast back in 2020.

What made Sigel think Dorsey is Nakamoto?

It’s safe to say that the findings gathered by Sean Murray convinced Sigel. In 12 months, Murray posted several articles on the deCashed website. The articles lay out the facts that allegedly prove Dorsey is Nakamoto.

One of the earliest facts in Dorsey’s life that traces him to being Satoshi is a 1996 picture of him wearing an RSA Munition T-shirt designed by a prominent cypherpunk, Adam Back, whose Hashcash technology helped Satoshi to create Bitcoin. Adam Back was one of the first people contacted by Nakamoto in 2008, initially mononymously as Satoshi.

Dorsey was an avid programmer. He knew the C coding language that was used to create Bitcoin. Murray outlines Dorsey’s early interest in distributed databases as, in 1998, Jack joined dispatch company DNet. One of the project’s occupations was facilitating online payments.

In the early years of Twitter, Dorsey lost his CEO position because he was dedicating too much time to his hobbies. That was the time when Satoshi was working on Bitcoin. 

One of the striking coincidences is that when the website of Dorsey’s company Square went live, it branded two blue squares on the logo. Two days later, Nakamoto offered blue squares when he was discussing the future Bitcoin logo.

In March of 2011, Dorsey became Executive Chair of Twitter while continuing his role as a Square CEO. In April, Nakamoto famously wrote his last public message, saying he “moved on to other things,” adding that Bitcoin is “in good hands with Gavin [Wood].” Soon after a Twitter widget appears on the Bitcoin Sourceforge page.

Ever since, Dorsey has been an active Bitcoin advocate. Square was one of the first companies to accept Bitcoin. 

Murray mentions that in 2014, Satoshi Nakamoto’s email was hacked. The hack revealed Nakamoto was subscribed to PYMNTS.com, a media that never mentioned Bitcoin until 2012 but has been reporting on Square and Dorsey. Not a big deal, considering how popular Dorsey was at the time and how few people were following Bitcoin in its early years. A more interesting piece of data originating from this hack is a screenshot of a receipt sent to a St. Louis recipient. St. Louis is the hometown of Dorsey, where some of his friends were still living at that time.

In 2022 Dorsey set up a Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund that helped to fight Craig Wright’s bogus claims he was the Bitcoin creator.

Overall, early interest in cypherpunks, cryptography, and decentralization contributed to Murray’s hypothesis. Dorsey’s documented admiration of books by Neal Stephenson also makes him a good Satoshi candidate, as Nakamoto used the references to Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon in his Bitcoin address.

More than that, Dorsey indicated increased interest in Japan and even visited the country around the time when the Satoshi Nakamoto persona started to make the first documented actions.

Weak spots

There are many other “arguments” in Murray’s articles. Some of them are pretty convincing, while others look lunatic. At times it may seem Murray is searching for confirmations of his guess rather than for the truth. For instance, on several occasions, he resorts to decoding acronyms found in the hashes of Satoshi transactions or finding signs in Nakamoto’s actions made around the dates of Dorsey’s tweets.

Jack Dorsey’s residence in 2 Mint Plaza is found near the U.S. Mint, references to which are allegedly encoded in the early Bitcoin transactions.

Murray goes so far as to use the graphic novel Hacktivist, made by Dorsey’s close friend Alyssa Milano, as another sign of the Satoshi-Dorsey connection. The novel follows a protagonist based on Satoshi Nakamoto and Jack Dorsey at the same time. The book was approved by Dorsey before the publication. Why a fantasy plot would serve as evidence is beyond comprehension.

Why was Sigel criticized for his claims?

To all the Bitcoin fans who insist that deanonymizing Satoshi Nakamoto is harmful to the future of Bitcoin, Sigel responds that the fact that Jack is Satoshi is good news for the market as it means that Satoshi’s $1.1 million holdings are not left to the mercy of fate but are reasonably secured and watched for. 

More than that, Sigel said CEOs draw some risks to their companies, but at the same time, they can address some of the concerns of the community.

However, some of the responses were pretty harsh. “Bitcoin has no CEO” is an important part of the Bitcoin supporters’ philosophy. No one is in charge but the community itself. No one to press on and no one to entice with money or the other way.

Today, many blast Vitalik Buterin, falsely claiming he is a communist. Others criticize Ripple for constantly dumping XRP. Nothing like this is possible until Satoshi Nakamoto is not present in the info field. That’s why the attempts to identify him are not met with enthusiasm. These attempts will persist, though.