Ex-Coinbase CTO Is Behind Mysterious Nakamoto.com, Sources Say

Nakamoto.com is a website that's more than twice as old as bitcoin, and for most of its life, it has just redirected to a San Francisco developer's personal website.

Now according to two industry sources, it's under the ownership of one of the best-known investors in crypto: Balaji S. Srinivasan, former Andreessen Horowitz partner, founder of Earn.com and former chief technology officer of Coinbase.

The current site says, "Nakamoto is bitcoin country. HODL or GTFO.".

Srinivasan led one of the best-funded early bitcoin companies, 21e6, which rebranded as 21 Inc and then again as Earn.com.

The original idea was to make home bitcoin miners for regular people.

In May 2017, it would open its bitcoin-powered email service to the public, allowing users to set up an account where correspondents would pay to get a reply in bitcoin.

Earn was then purchased by Coinbase in early 2018, a move many saw as an expensive acquisition of Srinivasan as much as it was an acquisition of the company itself.

Srinivasan announced he was leaving Coinbase in May. An investigation by The Information found that Srinivasan's departure followed a tense year of internal debate inside the company.

In short, now-former president and COO Asiff Hirji represented traditional finance aspirations; Srinivasan, in the CTO role, represented crypto's more rebellious ethos.

First registered in 1997, a quick scan of the Internet Archive shows the website belonged to a technologist who shares the last name of the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin.