Jeff Garzik

Jeff Garzik is one of the early developers of Bitcoin. He has founded the companies Bloq, Dunvegan Space Systems, Titan, Vesper Finance, Metronome, and SpaceChain.

Garzik is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1996, he received a degree in computer science. From 1995 to 1997, Garzik worked as a web developer at CNN, where he helped develop the first CNN website. He later worked as a principal software engineer at Red Hat from 2002 to 2013. He concurrently served as CEO at exMULTI, Inc. from 2011 to 2013. Following that, he was a Bitcoin core developer at BitPay from 2013 to 2014.

Founded in 2012, Dunvegan Space Systems is a company that provides turnkey satellite, satellite constellation, and space drone packages for the aerospace industry. Dunvegan partnered with Deep Space Industries in April 2014 to develop nanosatellites for BitSat, a project to launch satellite constellations to broadcast live bitcoin data. The project was ultimately cancelled when fundraising fell through.

Bloq was founded in February 2016 by Garzik and Matthew Roszak, an investor. Described as "Red Hat for blockchain," referring to the open-source software company, Bloq is a blockchain service that assists enterprise clients in creating their own open-source blockchain solution.

Garzik founded SpaceChain in 2017; he also serves as the CTO. SpaceChain is a blockchain company that works to provide "open and neutral" space infrastructure and broadcast blockchain information worldwide. It was the first blockchain company to launch with NASA when it launched its first payload carrying a node to the International Space Station in 2019.

In June 2018, Garzik released an altcoin called Metronome, first announced by his company Bloq in October 2017. Through a system of smart contracts, tokens can be exported and imported across different blockchains without altering the total coin supply, which ensures the token can survive even if individual underlying blockchain networks disappear. Metronome tokens were distributed through a descending price auction, in which the crowdsale price starts at its highest and decreases as tokens are sold.

Garzik cofounded Titan with Ryan Condron and fellow Bloq cofounder Matthew Roszak in September 2018. Titan offers cryptocurrency mining software and services, plus an enterprise-grade mining pool.

Vesper Finance is an Ethereum-based, decentralized finance (DeFi) yield aggregator for cryptocurrency investments. Vesper offers sets of investment pools for users to choose from, and tokens can be invested to earn in-kind yield (the same currency) or a different token type. The company was founded by Garzik, Jordan Kruger, and Matthew Roszak in 2020.

Garzik is one of the early developers of Bitcoin. The real identity of Bitcoin's creator is unknown, but the person (or group of people) goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In March 2019, Garzik was subpoenaed by the United States District Court of Southern Florida to provide documentation for the Kleiman v Wright bitcoin lawsuit. The suit, regarding bitcoin that was allegedly owed to a deceased man named David Kleiman, was initiated by Kleiman's brother Ira against Craig Wright, an Australian cryptographer who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Ira Kleiman claimed that Wright misappropriated billions of dollars-worth of bitcoin from David Kleiman's estate––David and Craig were former business partners. Garzik was subpoenaed for documents to support his claim from the previous year, in which he stated that Kleiman was the real Satoshi Nakamoto, saying, "It matches his coding style, this gentleman was self-taught. And the Bitcoin coder was someone who was very, very smart, but not a classically trained software engineer." In December 2021, it was ruled that Wright had to pay $100 million in damages to W&K Information Defense Research, a company he founded with Kleiman, for the unpaid use of the intellectual property.