Uncontested aspects of Dr Wright’s background and activities in Australia.
Dr Wright was born and raised in Australia, and spent most of his life there until 2015, when he moved to the UK. He claims to have earned more than 16 Master’s degrees and two doctoral degrees, including a PhD in Computer Science and Economics from Charles Sturt University.
In his evidence, Dr Wright relied on much of his employment history as giving him a unique series of stepping stones towards his claimed development of Bitcoin. I discuss those aspects below. Here I relate his employment history and introduce various people who gave evidence in support of his claim.
In the early to mid-1990s, he worked at OzEmail (an ISP in Australia) as a corporate account manager. In 1997-1998, he held a post as IT security consultant for the Australian Stock Exchange, where he developed IT security systems.
From 1997 to 2003 he worked primarily through DeMorgan Information Security Systems Ltd (“DeMorgan”), an IT security consultancy business that he founded. In 1998, DeMorgan was engaged by Lasseter’s Online Casino. During that time, he worked on “designing the [IT] security architecture” for Lasseter’s. It was during his time at Lasseter’s when he first came into contact with Mark Archbold. From 1998 to 2002, DeMorgan worked with Vodafone on IT security project work which involved implementing a firewall system. Whilst working with Vodafone, he met Rob Jenkins (“Mr Jenkins”).
In 2003, Dr Wright and his then wife (Lynn) sold their shares in DeMorgan. They later gave undertakings to the Court not to compete with the new shareholder. Dr Wright was subsequently held in contempt for breach of those undertakings. At first instance and on appeal, the Courts rejected a key claim by Dr Wright that an email found on his computer had been fabricated {L1/334/1}.
In late 2004, Dr Wright started work as an Associate Director of Information systems with the accountancy firm, BDO Kendalls (“BDO”). His work is said to have involved IT audits, digital forensics and fraud prevention {see Wright1 [48] {E/1/10} plus his 2007 CV at {L2/102/1} and his 2015 LinkedIn profile at {L11/130/6}. From 2005, Dr Wright as part of a BDO team provided services to CentreBet, an Australian sports betting site. During the course of that work, he first met Stefan Matthews (“Mr Matthews”), who was then CIO of CentreBet.
While working at BDO, Dr Wright from 2006 to 2008 undertook an LLM at the University of Northumbria, with his dissertation focusing on the legal status and liabilities of internet intermediaries. From 2007 to 2008, Dr Wright was also heavily occupied with studying for a series of IT security qualifications and with writing books and papers on IT security, regulation and audit.
Dr Wright was made redundant from BDO in November or December 2008, with his formal employment ending in January 2009. After that redundancy, he actively put himself forward for work focussed on IT security, and on 22 January 2009 he published a blog “A Return to Consulting”, in which he put himself forward as an expert in IT security and audit {see {Day6/38:12} - {Day6/41:19} and {L9/97/1} (the blog)}. In 2009, he started the companies Information Defense Pty Ltd and Integyrs Pty Ltd. Over the following years, he founded a series of other companies. It was also from 2009 that Dr Wright found himself the subject of investigations by the Australian Tax Office (“ATO”), which I have to discuss in greater detail below. Around late 2010, Dr Wright’s first marriage to Lynn Wright was failing, and they separated officially in January 2011.
The ATO investigations continued until about 2016. In some of these, Dr Wright made claims about mining large amounts of Bitcoin in the early days of the Bitcoin system, in conjunction with Dave Kleiman, who died in 2013. On 11 February 2014, Dr Wright sent an email to Louis Kleiman, Dave Kleiman’s father, to tell him that Dave (along with himself) was one of the three people behind Bitcoin.
This email eventually led to a claim by Ira Kleiman (Dave Kleiman’s brother, but acting in his capacity as the personal representative of the estate of Dave Kleiman) and W&K Info Defense Research LLC against Dr Wright brought in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida (Kleiman v Wright (Case No. 18-cv-80176-BLOOM/Reinhart)). See further below.
It seems that Dr Wright reconnected with Mr Matthews by meeting up on 2nd January 2014 in Sydney. This was a social occasion, but it seems to have led to Mr Matthews introducing Dr Wright to Robert MacGregor of nTrust in Canada by email on 3 February 2014. This introduction apparently led to a short conversation between Dr Wright and Mr MacGregor but nothing came of that conversation at the time.
Dr Wright next contacted Mr Matthews in around April 2015 by phone. In the call, Dr Wright told Mr Matthews he had a number of issues he wanted to discuss with him about his business in Australia. Mr Matthews recalls Dr Wright being quite anxious. On his next trip to Australia in April or May 2015, Mr Matthews had a lunch meeting with Dr Wright, Mr Allan Pedersen who worked for the DeMorgan Group running research programmes and Dr Stephane Savanah, an academic with a research role also in DeMorgan. Although there are aspects of what Mr Matthews says happened on that day which are controversial, it seems that Mr Pedersen and Dr Savanah were interested in persuading Mr Matthews to invest (millions) into their research into blockchain technology and Bitcoin, whereas Dr Wright remained anxious about the issues which DeMorgan were facing in terms of R&D grants which they had applied for and the related difficulties with the Australian Tax Office. Mr Matthews says that his research on the internet after the lunch was the first time he encountered the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr Matthews had dinner with Dr Wright later that day. Mr Matthews says he asked ‘who is Satoshi Nakamoto?’ to which he says Dr Wright replied ‘you already know the answer to that question’, whereupon Mr Matthews says he asked for a straight answer. In his witness statement here, Mr Matthews says Dr Wright replied ‘you are looking at him’, whereas in his evidence in Granath, Mr Matthews said that Dr Wright replied with ‘I am’.
After an apparently long explanation from Dr Wright about him being Satoshi, the conversation turned to the difficulties at DeMorgan. Dr Wright explained he wanted to protect his intellectual property, continue his research but not have anything to do with running companies, something he felt he was not good at. He wanted to push his ideas into a company which could turn them into ‘valuable solutions’.
Mr Matthews discussed the situation with Mr Ayre, a friend of his, who suggested that they introduce Dr Wright to Mr MacGregor since his company nTrust was involved in Bitcoin and blockchain technology. This resulted in Mr Matthews and Dr Wright flying to Vancouver in late May 2015, to meet with Mr Ayre and then with Mr MacGregor. The initial encounter with Mr MacGregor did not go well, but Mr Matthews persevered which resulted in he and Mr MacGregor travelling to Sydney and spending some time in the offices of DeMorgan. Again, there are aspects of Mr Matthews’ evidence on this encounter which are controversial, but the end result was that Mr MacGregor got involved in the creation and initial funding of what Mr Matthews describes as the nCrypt project.
A ‘first version’ of a ‘Heads of Terms’ document was signed on 29 June 2015 {ID_004127}. Mr Matthews says the basic idea was to transfer the IP from the DeMorgan Group to a new company within the nCrypt group (now called the nChain group), with Dr Wright as Chief Scientist continuing his research activities. Mr Matthews says this was a rushed process because DeMorgan had to pay its solicitors, Clayton Utz, substantial fees (between 1-1.2m Au$) by 30 June 2015. The payment was organised by Mr MacGregor. A second version of the ‘Heads of Terms’ was signed on 30 June 2015 to remove the provision in the first version that Dr Wright and his wife would have equity in the new company.
Mr Matthews says that part of the plan was for Dr Wright to move to the UK (along with his family) to work as nCrypt’s Chief Scientist at its base in London. He and his family made trips to London in or around September/October 2015 to find schools and to look at a property in Wimbledon leased for them by one of Mr MacGregor’s companies. Their belongings were packed up and shipped to the UK, with Dr Wright and his family moving into a serviced apartment in Sydney.
The next set of dates concern the identification of Dr Wright as potentially being Satoshi:
In November and early December 2015, Dr Wright faced enquiries from reporters at Wired and Gizmodo magazines concerning his potentially being identified as Satoshi.
On 8th December 2015, Wired magazine published an article in which it indicated a belief that Dr Wright was the person behind the Satoshi pseudonym and on 9th December 2015, Gizmodo magazine published a similar article.
In mid-December 2015, Wired and Gizmodo published further articles which sought to cast doubt on whether Dr Wright was Satoshi.
Mr Matthews says that around the same time, the DeMorgan offices were raided by the federal police under a warrant secured by the ATO. It seems that if the police had managed to catch up with Dr Wright, they would have detained him. Mr Matthews was flying to Manila that same day and organised a ticket for Dr Wright, on the basis that the plans were already in place for Dr Wright to move to the UK. Thus, it appears that Dr Wright managed to evade the authorities in Australia and spent a couple of days in Manila before travelling onto London.