Eric Tristan Voorhees, generally known as Eric Voorhees is an American-Panamanian cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder of one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges ShapeShift. Apart from ShapeShift, he is well known as the co-founder of Satoshi Dice and as the marketing director at BitInstant. Voorhees has been referred to as a crypto-libertarian, and has advocated for “the separation of money and state”. The visionary entrepreneur was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1984. He entered the cryptocurrency arena 2003 with the companionship of Nicolas Cary, a fellow student from the University of Puget Sound.
Early Life And Education
Eric Voorhees was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1984 and raised in Colorado. His university education was at the University of Puget Sound where he met Nicolas Cary who introduced him to the cryptocurrency arena. After graduating from the University of Puget Sound, he moved to Dubai and worked as a communication manager in a real estate company. He has been living in The Republic of Panama since 2013.
Eric Voorhees And His Cryptocurrency Career
The American-Panamanian startup developer has been an active participant in the cryptocurrency sphere since 2011 when he initially encountered Bitcoin. Voorhees has been involved in multiple cryptocurrency applications and Bitcoin ventures since 2011 and currently, he is the founder and CEO of ShapeShift, a prominent crypto exchange. SatoshiDICE, Coinapult, Bitinstant, and FeedZeBirds are major Bitcoin ventures put forward by Voorhees.
The role of Eric Voorhoos as a startup developer began in 2012 when he founded SatoshiDICE, a crypto-based gambling platform offering dice games using Bitcoin. Due to some legal issues, he had to sell the company for $11.5 million a year later. The acquisition of SatoshiDICE is widely considered one of the biggest blockchain business acquisitions. In 2013, he introduced Coinapult, a firm that used SMS text messaging service to send BTC, later he sold this company as well. He was forced to shut down FeedZeBirds, a Bitcoin Twitter advertising platform that paid users in BTC to retweet some sponsored messages. In this issue, the SEC fined him and found out that he was using social media platforms to accumulate investors’ capital without following proper legal compliance.
Eric Voorhees And ShapeShift
ShapeShift is the most successful venture in the career of Voorhees. Voorhees launched ShapeShift in 2014. ShapeShift is a cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to purchase, sell, trade, and store digital assets like Bitcoin, and Ethereum. The project has managed to raise more than ten million dollars in seed funding and was one of the highly rated exchanges at that time. ShapeShift was quite different from the rest of the exchanges, it didn’t require user identification and allowed anonymous transactions, these features incited the growth of criminals. ShapeShift has been a profitable subject of scrutiny, Voorhees and ShapeShift were accused of multiple criminal activities including money laundering.
According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, published in 2018, ShapeShift had allegedly facilitated the laundering of $90 million over two years. The company had to require personal identification and customer information after this issue. In the same year, Eric Voorhees was under investigation by the SEC for reportedly alleged $50 million cryptocurrency sale by Salt Lending Holdings Inc, where he was a part of the fundraising. Recently, in 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a cease-and-desist against ShapeShift for allegedly breaching the Securities Exchange Act. ShapeShift and Voorhees settled the issue by reportedly paying a $275,000 fine and reached an agreement that the firm would no longer violate the compliances put forward by the SEC.
The Bottom Line
Eric Tristan Voorhees is a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency sphere and the entire decentralized finance system. He made a significant impact in the crypto space, even though he had a rough initial run at the early period of his career. The SEC was continuously in combat with him and fined him numerous times, but it never fatigued him, and continued his innovations and came up with advanced exchanges like ShapeSift. The controversies and alleged crypto scams never gave him an ideal identity within the community. The enhanced affinity of Voorhees towards Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies made him one of the influential figures in the cryptocurrency world. “Within five years there will be a major financial meltdown and crypto will be ready”, this was a groundbreaking pronouncement from Eric Tristan Voorhees, and we can see how much impact and significance cryptocurrencies have in our contemporary world.
