Adam Back Hid a Convicted Felon's Control of Billions, and It Sank His SPAC, Plus Greg Maxwell's Role
Adam Back won't answer questions about a convicted felon, the missing Bitcoin, or the 20% yields promised to investors. Behind the scenes look at what collapsed the SPAC and Greg Maxwell's role.
TLDR: A convicted fraudster, Christopher Cook, secretly controls billions in investor funds at Adam Back’s Blockstream. The money, much raised on the promise of a 20% yield from Bitcoin mining, circulates among a ring of related parties, and there's no proof the Bitcoin owed to investors actually exists or can be repaid. Adam Back has refused to answer investors' pointed questions about fraud and Bitcoin custody, and has helped conceal the scale of Christopher Cook's wealth from Blockstream's own employees. The behind-the-scenes story of why Adam Back's SPAC just collapsed.
Adam Back has grossly misled the public about why his SPAC deal collapsed, we feel. Cantor Equity Partners I (CEPO) and Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR), Adam Back’s Bitcoin treasury company, announced yesterday that they won’t complete their stock merger, citing market conditions.
But market conditions are not what killed Adam Back’s stock deal. Adam Back's BSTR listing collapsed because of the serious allegations of fraud, conflicts of interest, and undisclosed related-party transactions we laid out in Part 1 of our investigation. Those findings put the large investors contractually obligated to fund the deal on alert, and they began pressing Adam Back and BSTR for answers about the fraud allegations and the convicted felon Christopher Cook's role in the company. Sources say Adam Back and BSTR went quiet, refusing to get on conference calls. Why?
On June 5, 2026, Adam Back’s SPAC deal was blessed by the SEC, with the S-4 declared effective; on 8 Jun 2026 we published our investigation highlighting potential fraud at Blockstream and the serious deficits in control and governance at BSTR, the investigation went viral with Laura Shin, Zeke Faux, BitMEX Research, ChainCatcher, Matthew Kratter and others posting, retweeting and demanding Adam Back answer questions about serious fraud allegations at Blockstream and BSTR. The shareholder vote on the SPAC deal was originally set for June 26. On June 24, just two days before that vote, it was postponed by a week to July 2, and Cantor extended the redemption deadline to June 30, the date by which investors who had bought the stock could still redeem their money. Bloomberg’s Ryan Weeks reported that Cantor was allowing large PIPE investors to commit far less than they were contractually obligated to, cutting the commitment required to one-third. On June 30, 2026, the same day as that redemption deadline, the deal was postponed a second time. The general meeting was pushed back another week to July 10, and the redemption deadline was extended to July 8. Finally, on July 8, 2026, just over two weeks after the first postponement and the same day as the newly extended redemption deadline was due, the deal collapsed. The official announcement stated that the transaction would not close, dropped the requirement for the hedge funds contractually on the hook to complete the $1.5 billion in private placements, and postponed the shareholder meeting indefinitely.
We can reveal that behind the scenes, the investors who were contractually obligated to fund the deal were putting pointed questions to Adam Back and the BSTR team. Investors pressed Adam Back on the use of Komainu as the designated Bitcoin custodian (for more on the conflicts this presented, read Part 1), and on the 20% yield Blockstream was promising investors, asking how the company could pay such a rich and unrealistic return. We can also reveal that at least one of the large hedge funds contractually obligated to fund the private placement threatened to sue for material breach, which finally resulted in Adam Back’s SPAC deal being cancelled.
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
To understand why sophisticated investors who were contractually obligated to fund Adam Back's SPAC still managed to walk away, one has to look at the questions they were raising behind the scenes, and that Adam Back could not answer:
The Bitcoin custodian being used by BSTR is Komainu, which is under the control of Blockstream with Adam Back sitting on the board of directors at Komainu, this was not a trustworthy custodian that the investors could count on to actually verify whether the Bitcoin being contributed a) existed b) was unencumbered and clear (this became a much sharper question after the billions of dollars in Blockstream Mining liabilities that were owed to investors was revealed as questionable by our investigation).
A Russian VC fund, Fulgur Ventures (managed by Oleg Mikhalsky), sits on both sides of the Adam Back CEPO/BSTR merger. Oleg Mikhalsky controls the entity selling BSTR into the deal, and he separately holds a large stake in CEPO, the SPAC on the other side of the transaction. On the sell side, the S-4 discloses that Oleg Mikhalsky, of Fulgur Ventures, owns more than 50% of the voting interest in Blockstream Capital Partners LLC (BCP). BCP controls Blockstream Capital Fund II, LP, which in turn owns BSTR Holdings (Cayman), the Seller. So Mikhalsky sits at the top of the chain that delivers BSTR into the transaction. On the SPAC side, "Oleg Mikhalskiy," the same individual, spelled with an extra "i," is a director of Fulgur Investment Management Limited, the general partner of Fulgur Frontier Capital LP. That fund holds 2,500,000 CEPO Class A shares, or 12.2% of available shares, as reported on a Form 3 and a Schedule 13G/13G-A, each signed by Oleg Mikhalskiy in that capacity.
In plain English: the same Russian VC fund controlled the seller and was a big buyer in Adam Back's SPAC deal, a related-party conflict that should have been disclosed as such, but wasn't.
In Part 1 we set out our hypothesis, based on the facts described there, that the BMN product exhibits characteristics we associate with a Ponzi like scheme. In the 24 hours after we published, BMN funds raised on STOKR, the Luxembourg platform that issues these suspect investments for Adam Back’s Blockstream, jumped from $1,112,008,778 ($1.1 billion) to $1,998,355,539 ($1.9 billion), a single-day increase of $886,346,761 that makes little sense. STOKR also quietly edited several pages to remove incriminating details, with no explanation. Source: https://stokr.io/blockstream-mining2/.
The questions investors were asking all lead back to one person Blockstream has worked hard to keep out of view…
How The Convicted Felon Came To Blockstream And Met Adam Back: Through Greg Maxwell
To understand what’s gone wrong at Blockstream it’s important to understand one crucial player in this saga who has gone out of his way to keep his role in Blockstream and BSTR hidden and that is Christopher William Cook, a man who spent 3 years in prison for financial fraud and has made statements we have found to be demonstrably false (detailed below) while in a role handling billions of investor funds entrusted to Blockstream. Christopher William Cook is listed in Blockstream Mining Note documentation as the person in charge of actually mining the Bitcoin Blockstream is to deliver to investors, and Christopher Cook has been described in company materials variously as Blockstream’s Chief Information Officer and as CTO, and now CEO of Exacore, Blockstream’s Bitcoin mining arm. He is one of the principal architects of the investment products that have raised billions of dollars from investors who trusted Adam Back and Blockstream.
We can reveal that Christopher Cook was brought into Blockstream by Greg Maxwell, a Blockstream co-founder and longtime Bitcoin Core developer who is a controversial figure. According to multiple sources, both Christopher Cook and Greg Maxwell have been friends since their teens. According to human sources Greg Maxwell looked up to Christopher Cook owing to Cook’s ownership of a Lamborghini (acquired from the fraud scheme Cook went to prison for), access to fast cash, Cook being “street wise” and Cook’s “social proclivities”.
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
More so than taking the word of human sources. We have found easily verifiable technical signatures that tie together both Greg Maxwell and Christopher Cook (the convicted Florida based felon). The clearest of those signatures is a domain-name based record. Historical DNS data shows that Maxwell’s personal website, nt4tn[.]net, used the nameservers ns3[.]broadwave[.]com and ns4[.]broadwave[.]com from 2008 to 2011. Broadwave Corporation was the felon Christopher Cook’s satellite-communications venture (that is extensively mentioned in his indictment and sentencing documentation). For Greg Maxwell’s personal website domain to have been served by Christopher Cook’s company’s nameservers in that window indicates the two men were technically and personally connected years before Blockstream existed and around the time Cook was being sentenced to prison for fraud.
A credential-lookup query on the password string “********” (obscured) among breached passwords returns an exposed list of email accounts containing both Greg Maxwell’s long-known developer e-mail address (greg@xiph.org) and Cook’s primary Broadwave e-mail address (ccook@broadwave.com). This suggests the two men used an identical, non-obvious password, which likely means they used shared credentials to sign into their e-mail accounts.
Both Greg Maxwell and Christopher Cook independently describe the same unusual background in radio communications. On his website, Maxwell recounts running radio communications for a Florida municipality and working with amateur-radio operators on disaster recovery. Source: https://nt4tn.net/radio/. The court record in Cook's fraud case shows the same activity detailed from his side: letters from Martin County officials describe Cook supporting a county radio network and staffing the Emergency Operations Center during the 2004 hurricanes in Florida. Cook's own filings say this work with radios "inspired the technology" behind Broadwave.
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
That the Chris Cook at Blockstream is the same Christopher William Cook (friends with Blockstream’s co-founder Greg Maxwell) convicted in the fraud case rests on several independent, publicly verifiable matches: the same name, date of birth; the same distinctive satellite-communications background (Broadwave then, Blockstream Satellite now); the same specific, and unusual NASA Space Shuttle biographical claim, repeated across two decades; and the Broadwave-to-Maxwell domain name graph described above along with the shared passwords. Blockstream’s Cook leads the Blockstream Satellite business, and Christopher Cook’s court filings and post-prison company are documented as building satellite communications systems, including an Iraq satellite-phone charitable project (which was likely done to help get a sentence reduction).
As mentioned in Part 1 of this investigative series, Cook has made demonstrably false claims while at Blockstream. One is that he worked for NASA at the age of eighteen. His biography on the Blockstream Mining Note (BMN) investment page at STOKR has prominently described him as "Formerly of NASA," and his sentencing filings in the fraud case, including a letter from his parents, describe a NASA Space Shuttle internship. In reality, these claims trace back to a school program that allowed Cook to visit NASA in 1999, when he was eighteen, not to any employment.
Blockstream’s handling of Christopher Cook is itself notable. Christopher Cook has taken unusual steps to avoid appearing on camera or in photographs in connection with Blockstream, and the company has taken correspondingly unusual steps to keep his role in fundraising and key decisions (especially decisions involving BSTR) obscured, while a number of Christopher Cook’s friends and family members appear on Blockstream and Exacore payroll.
Why did Greg Maxwell want to bring Christopher Cook, who court records show was convicted in a federal fraud case, into Blockstream, a company Maxwell was co-founding? According to people familiar with the matter, Maxwell felt he needed someone who was street smart and had sharp elbows to look after his interests. But based on the facts laid out in Part 1 of this investigation, it is our view that the arrangement did not work out that way.
Public records we have traced show Christopher Cook buying assets such as multiple aircraft, yachts, 40-plus houses, a fleet of luxury cars, a helicopter, an unusual dating website, and more that we estimate exceed $442 million in value. We have not been able to independently establish the source of these funds, and it is our view that, given Christopher Cook's salaried role and documented financial history (he emerged from prison with very little money and Christopher Cook’s father filed for bankruptcy around that time, the Cook family are not wealthy), the scale of Christopher Cook’s current spending raises serious questions about where all the money Christopher Cook is now spending actually comes from.
How Adam Back, Alexander Chen, and others have hidden Christopher Cook’s Wild Spending from Blockstream Employees
According to multiple people familiar with the company, the scale of Christopher Cook’s personal spending was actively kept hidden from Blockstream’s own employees, an effort that has involved CEO Adam Back along with Christopher Cook’s close friend and colleague Alexander Chen (whose wife Joanna Flores Chen is also on Cook’s payroll).
When Adam Back would fly on Christopher Cook’s private aircraft the fact was concealed from other staff on multiple occasions. When Christopher Cook would fly into Blockstream employee meetups on his own jet Adam Back and other executive team members of Blockstream have gone to unusual lengths to run interference and hide the fact that Christopher Cook flew in on his own aircraft. This goes to show that Christopher Cook’s immense wealth and ownership of multiple planes is not something Adam Back wanted his own employees finding out about!
Another telling detail comes from a mid-level employee who works on other Blockstream products: despite the fact that Blockstream's Bitcoin mining division absorbed billions of dollars raised from investors, "Cook runs Blockstream mining like a black box", with no meaningful oversight or controls. It is a strange arrangement. Adam Back and the Blockstream board handed a convicted financial fraudster unchecked control over billions of dollars in investor funds.
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
Wild Spending On Personal Assets By Christopher Cook
If Cook controls the Bitcoin mining at Blockstream as a black box, where does the money go? The possible answer, traced across public records, is staggering.
Over the last three years, Christopher Cook has spent over $442 million on personal assets (including planes, yachts, jets, luxury cars and penthouses) that we have managed to trace. Cook is a salaried executive at a private company. Less than a decade before this wild spending began, he emerged from federal prison, his Father filed for personal bankruptcy and his family does not come from wealth.
The spending seemingly spans nearly every category of luxury asset imaginable. It includes multiple penthouses in New York and Miami; more than thirty apartments within a single Miami Beach development, Bentley Bay; mansions across Florida, Nevada, and Hawaii; several private aircraft, among them a Gulfstream G650ER with the tail number N69DJ owned through Knight Sky III LLC and a Boeing 767 with the tail number N69DD owned through Knight Sky II LLC - Cook has a puerile tendency of getting “69” in the tail numbers of all 3 of the private jets he flies on, including the G550 which serves as his daily workhorse plane with the tail number N69CK (owned through CD 321 LLC); multiple yachts, an extensive collection of luxury and collector automobiles; seven-figure watches and jewelry; large outlays on music festivals and private parties; and, more idiosyncratically, a pair of Boston Dynamics robot dogs that cost upward of $74,000 apiece and billed to Blockstream rather than paid personally (one of which he gifted to Alexander Chen).
Some of the other unusual assets he’s acquired include 2 DeLorean cars, and a DeLorean hovercraft. Christopher Cook, based on sources, is a big fan of the Back to the Future movie series which featured DeLorean cars as well of the Movie Bad Boys, so much so that Christopher Cook formed 2 trusts The Lowrey Trust and The Burnett Trust (through Charles T Weiss) to own several apartments through, with Lowrey and Burnett being the last names of characters from the movie Bad Boys (Cook has claimed that Bad Boys the movie was shot in some of the apartments he owns in Miami).
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
Another odd asset Christopher Cook owns is an anonymous dating app modeled after Seeking Arrangement. Collective Theory Corp, a company registered at a Miami address Cook owns, created Rabbithole, a dating platform whose entire pitch is secrecy. It markets itself as the anonymous dating app where privacy comes first, promising "no shared connections, no real names" and "secure, stealthy swiping" built for people who value discretion. The dating app advertises encrypted messaging, "stealth" notifications, and complete profile deletion at any time the ability to connect on your own terms and "leave without a trace." According to human sources, the dating app was built using Blockstream's engineering resources.
Since 2022 Investors Demanding Adam Back Show Proof of Reserves
The spending by Christopher Cook raises an obvious question, is the Bitcoin owed to investors actually there? Since 2022, they've been asking the same thing.
Investors who trusted Adam Back and put billions into Blockstream’s cloud-mining investment product, the Blockstream Mining Notes (BMN), began asking for independent proof of Bitcoin reserves in 2022, during the panic that followed the FTX collapse. They were told it was being worked on in 2022. They are still waiting! As of 2026, neither Blockstream nor STOKR, the Luxembourg platform that issues the investment products, has ever published one.
This failure to deliver independent proof of reserves of Bitcoin is worth considering against what Adam Back publicly says. At BTC Prague in 2026 Adam Back took the stage to warn that Bitcoin markets keep rerunning a script that should have been retired years ago. He pointed to FTX, and before it Mt. Gox, and argued that the industry still refuses to adopt the safeguards traditional finance spent centuries building. The fatal flaw, Adam Back said, is platforms that fuse custody with trading, creating a single point of failure that swallows customer assets the moment the platform implodes.
Adam Back is right about this. That is the problem, because his own investment product which has raised billions is built the way he says a product holding user funds should never be built.
Blockstream holds onto the Bitcoin owed to investors with no way for investors to verify the Bitcoin exists. Under the terms of the offering, Blockstream’s own operating entity holds the coins for the full 48-month term with no independent custodian, no proof-of-reserves requirement, and no attestation obligation. The offering document concedes that a custody arrangement was “not yet in place.” This is the same single point of failure Adam Back condemns in FTX and Mt. Gox: assets held by the same entity the investor is trusting, verifiable on nothing but that entity’s word. Blockstream and Adam Back are fond of the maxim “Don’t trust, verify.” Billions of dollars have been raised here on the strength of Adam Back’s name, the man who invented Hashcash, the proof-of-work scheme cited in the Bitcoin white paper. Investors are asked to trust, and given nothing to verify (which would be trivial to provide if the Bitcoin actually existed).
Everyone’s a Related Party: STOKR, Fulgur Ventures and Serious Conflicts of Interest
STOKR is a Luxembourg-based digital-securities platform. It packages private investments as blockchain-based tokens and runs the apparatus around them. Fund administration for the Blockstream products is handled, according to third-party sources, by the Luxembourg corporate-services arm of Baker Tilly, a large mainstream accounting network whose name lends the structure an added measure of respectability.
For the Blockstream Mining Notes, STOKR is the storefront. It issues the investment, vets the buyers, and presents the investment product to the market as a legitimate, listed security. To an investor, STOKR's status as an independent, Luxembourg-regulated party is part of what makes the investment look like a real financial instrument.
STOKR, however, is not independent. Blockstream Capital Partners, Blockstream's own investment arm, lists STOKR among its portfolio holdings. In other words, Blockstream invested money into STOKR and is now using STOKR to raise billions of dollars. This is not normal!
This dependence runs the other way too, which is what makes the conflict structural rather than coincidental. STOKR is a small company, and the Blockstream family of investment offerings is, by a wide margin, its largest business. The Blockstream Mining Notes alone account for well over a billion dollars in issuance, and the related PKH, PKH2, and PKB notes add hundreds of millions more. A boutique platform like STOKR does not lightly jeopardize the relationship that is important to its survival. Whatever STOKR's formal duties to investors, its commercial survival depends on keeping its largest issuer (and part owner - Blockstream) happy, and that issuer is the very party whose product it is supposed to present at arm's length. Going by the posts of STOKR founder Arnab Naskar on Twitter, the relationship between the two is unusually close.
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
Furthermore STOKR’s other large investor is Fulgur Ventures, which is also the lead investor in Blockstream itself, having led its $210 million convertible-note financing. Blockstream Capital Partners is in turn majority-voting-controlled by Fulgur’s Oleg Mikhalsky, and lists Fulgur alongside STOKR among Blockstream Capital Partners’ holdings.
Capital moves in a circle. Blockstream into Fulgur, Fulgur into Blockstream. This is not normal! Source: https://blockstreamcapitalpartners.com/.
Fulgur Ventures
Fulgur Ventures is the Russian private investment firm that sits at the center of Blockstream’s capital structure, and it is the thread that ties the supposedly separate parties together and goes all the way into the BSTR-CEPO deal that just collapsed. Fulgur Ventures is managed by Vitaly Bezrodnykh and Oleg Mikhalsky.
On the issuer side, Fulgur led Blockstream’s $210 million convertible-note financing in October 2024, making it the lead investor in the parent of the entity that issues the Mining Notes. Fulgur is also a lead investor in STOKR, the notes’ technology provider, whitelister, and marketplace, through a $7.4 million stake. And the ownership runs in a circle with capital going from one party to another then back again. Oleg Mikhalsky (of Fulgur) holds more than half the voting control of Blockstream Capital Partners (BCP), which in turn lists both Fulgur and STOKR among its investment holdings (indicating that Blockstream capital is flowing back into Fulgur).
Fulgur turns up on both sides of Adam Back’s SPAC deal that just collapsed. In the BSTR treasury-company SPAC, a Fulgur entity, Fulgur Frontier Capital, subscribed for 2,500,000 shares, a substantial share of the deal, placing Fulgur among the largest investors buying a transaction that it was also selling (yes, Fulgur on BCP side was selling while Fulgur’s Fulgur Frontier Capital was buying) - this was a serious related-party conflict that should have been disclosed by BSTR.
How Fulgur builds large equity stakes is itself worth noting. In a January 2026 SEC filing concerning Fold Holdings, a Bitcoin company unrelated to Blockstream, Fulgur disclosed that an unnamed limited partner had spent 2025 buying roughly $27.6 million of Fold stock in that partner’s own name, “on behalf of” the fund, then transferred the shares to Fulgur at year-end for no consideration. This is incredibly odd. Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1889123/000149315226010527/xslSCHEDULE_13D_X01/primary_doc.xml.
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
Who ultimately stands behind Fulgur Venture’s money is harder to establish than one might expect. By market accounts, much of its capital is understood to be Vitaly Bezrodnykh’s own, on the strength of a reputation as an early Bitcoin investor. That account, however, rests largely on Vitaly Bezrodnykh’s own representations. The circularity of the fund flows complicates the picture of whose money Fulgur is managing, because Blockstream funds appear to be moving into Fulgur and then back from Fulgur into Blockstream - according to the Blockstream Capital Partners (BCP) website.
Since 2022, a Camaiore-based holding called Vers Italia, wholly owned by Vers Properties, a Luxembourg-anonymous vehicle ultimately tracing to Vitaly Bezrodnykh, has executed a string of Tuscan acquisitions. The most recent is the Buonamico wine estate in the Montecarlo DOC, bought from the Fontana family for €5.5M (plus assumed mortgage debt) and signed at a notary in Querceta in late March. The earlier acquisitions cluster along the Versilia coast: a seafront villa at Poveromo (La Romanina SRL), the Royal beach club and the Hotel Tirreno and Hotel Belvedere in Forte dei Marmi, the Alba sul Mare and Valdinievole hotels in Lido di Camaiore, the former Bulgarella-developed hotel on Viale Einaudi in Viareggio, and stakes in the Principe di Piemonte conference center, restaurant, and beach establishment. That’s at least nine separate hospitality and real-estate assets, plus the wine estate, accumulated over just four years by Vitaly Bezrodnykh. Source: https://www.iltirreno.it/lucca/cronaca/2026/04/30/news/lucca-la-mani-russe-sulla-tenuta-da-sogno-chi-e-il-nuovo-proprietario-1.100863258
Vitaly Bezrodnykh’s Italian acquisitions were preceded by major real estate acquisitions in Lugano, Switzerland, the heart of Ticino’s luxury district. Reporting by La Domenica (Davide Illarietti) identifies Bezrodnykh as the buyer behind an acquisition in Contrada di Sassello, the chic backstreet off Via Nassa, with a market value of €25–30 million. The article characterizes Vitaly Bezrodnykh as “a venture capitalist active in the cryptocurrency sector across Singapore, the United States, and El Salvador” and notes that between 2020 and 2021 he acquired three major hotel complexes in Forte dei Marmi through a Bahamas-based company. Source: https://www.cdt.ch/prodotti/la-domenica/i-turisti-del-mattone-si-comprano-il-centro-di-lugano-393643
Blockstream and the fake CIA associations of Christopher Cook
Christopher Cook has a pattern of forming doppelganger shell companies whose names are confusingly similar to established defense contractors and government programs. Christopher Cook formed Deep Space Network LLC in West Virginia and Delaware and used it to acquire a satellite broadcast base station, a name that mirrors NASA’s Deep Space Network, the agency’s array of deep-space communications antennas. Christopher Cook’s aircraft are held through Knight Sky LLC, Knight Sky II LLC, and Knight Sky III LLC, names that closely track Knight Sky, a U.S. government communications contractor that was acquired by Network Innovations, a legitimate government contractor.
This is not the first time Christopher Cook has invoked national-security connections that don’t seem to exist. After his 2006 arrest in a federal mail-fraud case, legal filings represented that the CIA and related intelligence agencies were interested in utilizing Christopher Cook’s communications technology. A probation-plan exhibit stated that the CIA was working with him to provide communication systems to remote parts of the world in aid of national security. A restitution-plan exhibit went further, asserting that his systems would aid intelligence-gathering and that a foreign embassy in Qatar was already using his system. Christopher Cook’s fraud trial’s § 2255 motion stated that the CIA had been in talks to purchase his technology, while conceding there had been no final outcome.
Are you a journalist or Blockstream employee who wants to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
This is a common trope that should be familiar to people. What’s uncommon however is the fact that this individual has access to billions of dollars of investor funds.
Donald Trump & David Bailey’s Nakamoto Deal
Christopher Cook and Adam Back show up as buyers in two big crypto stock deals. One being David Bailey’s Nakamoto and Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media.
David Bailey’s Nakamoto venture, it raised about $540 million in a private placement, and when it registered those shares with the SEC on December 5, 2025, it named the investors who put up the money. Adam Back is on the list under his own name, holding 8,928,572 shares. So is Christopher Cook’s C Systems USA LLC, holding 4,464,285 shares. Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1946573/000149315225026462/formposam.htm
The second is Trump Media & Technology Group, which trades as DJT and raised about $1.4 billion in 2025 to fund a Bitcoin strategy. Its SEC filing names the same two buyers again: Adam Back with 680,404 shares, and C Systems USA LLC with 486,003. Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000114036125021579/ny20050075x1_s3.htm
Galaxy Digital, the crypto financial-services firm run by Mike Novogratz, was a significant lender to Blockstream. The connection is documented in an SEC comment letter to Galaxy dated November 16, 2023, which notes that Galaxy’s loan to Blockstream was secured by substantially all of Blockstream’s physical assets and made up a material portion of Galaxy’s loan book at the end of 2022 and into 2023. Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1859392/000000000023012573/filename1.pdf. Amanda Fabiano was Head of Mining at Galaxy Digital during that time. According to sources, Amanda Fabiano served as a point of contact between Christopher Cook and Blockstream (and there was substantial tensions between the two). Amanda Fabiano later became an employee of Nakamoto Holdings, David Bailey’s Bitcoin venture.
Adam Back is Satoshi?
For the avoidance of doubt based on the facts that have been outlined in our investigations about Blockstream and Adam Back we feel it is preposterous to entertain the possibility that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.
This is Part 2 in this series of investigative pieces taking a closer look at Adam Back, Blockstream, Greg Maxwell, Chris Cook, Samson Mow, STOKR, Arnab Naskar, Fulgur Ventures, Vitaly Bezrodnykh, Oleg Mikhalsky and the Blockstream Mining Investment products that have raised billions of dollars with some offering investors yields as high as 20% APR paid out quarterly. We’ll be posting more information. We are glad the red flags outlined in Part 1 led to Adam Back’s BSTR stock listing receiving the scrutiny it deserved.
Do you want to learn more about this? Please visit our website NatInfoSec.com and get in touch with us or email us at nat@natinfosec.com.
Maybe there's some facts here. Maybe there's not.
The first article is defamatory to the dozens of everyday rank-and-file who actually built and run the Exacore mines.
Calling the mines fake harms the ordinary people who rely on this work experience on their resume for future employment.
Especially relevant if you succeed in your campaign to collapse their employer.
I want to apologize for what I said earlier. When my comment said I was suspended, and you said "Nice shiny new Wordpress website" I thought you were insulting me because I am new to Substack. I thought that "word press" meant my account here. But I realized why you said "Wordpress" now...
it's because this site I linked that "alleges" to list Andy Back's mines is a Word Press: https://www.exacore.com/sites . Duuuuuuuuhhhh.
I also realized you misunderstood where I was coming from if you think I work with the island people. LOL I don't work for them or make their website. that was confusing me too.
I like your article. It's very good. I don't remember what my original post said, but I was asking about this because I saw your article on X and I was going to say how ALL Andy's mines are ALL props like in a movie. but you only mentioned one mine. So I wanted to make sure I had a source before I said that.
Since I didn't understand, I thought you were suspending me and making fun of my account because I called him "Andy". then i thought, you were one of the island people that still calls him "Adam" in your article.
but now I realize I misunderstood, and I'm really sorry I thought you were one of them. obviously you're not!!!
I hope TOM comes back to give us more information to make fun of!!! anyway I am sorry this is my last post here. cheers.