Erik Tristan Voorhees is a Panamanian-American entrepreneur. He co-founded the Bitcoin startup Coinapult, which sends Bitcoin by SMS and email, he worked as the director of marketing at the BitInstant exchange, and was the founder and part-owner of the Bitcoin gambling website Satoshi Dice, which later sold in July 2013 to an undisclosed buyer. Before joining the Free State Project, Voorhees was based in Colorado and later lived in Dubai, Panama, New York City, and New Hampshire.
Voorhees is also the founder and CEO of ShapeShift, an instant Bitcoin and altcoin exchange that he developed and managed under the alias Beorn Gonthier until March 2015, when he revealed his role in the company as part of a seed fundraising announcement. Some of his ventures have resulted in penalties and legal issues with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
Voorhees is an outspoken libertarian who opposes taxes, financial regulation and the government in general. ShapeShift reflects his political and economic beliefs in that it is a free service.
ShapeShift integrated roughly a dozen decentralized exchange protocols in January 2021 to relieve both the company and users of Know Your Customer obligations while also providing traders with greater liquidity, price, asset availability and security. In a podcast, Voorhees slammed Bitcoin maximalists for trashing proponents of other cryptocurrencies during the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, claiming that “central banks, banking and fiat currency” are the true enemies of Bitcoin and Bitcoin maximalists, rather than the “Dogecoin community or Ethereum community.”
Voorhees presented an argument for decentralization in many aspects of life and the economy in an interview in July 2021, focusing on the case for decentralization of business and money. He then applied this theory to money, arguing that a small, centralized organization should not have a monopoly on currency in order to produce a truly equitable society. Toward the end of 2021, ShapeShift began its transition to a DAO model.
After cross-chain decentralized exchange ThorChain suffered two multimillion-dollar hacks in July 2021 along with a third, albeit minor, breach, Voorhees argued that the exploits show that ThorChain still has a long way to go, but that the fact that it can provide a chain-agnostic decentralized exchange is a “huge development for the industry.”
On Oct. 13, 2020, regarding a G20 report stating that its members will complete regulatory stablecoin frameworks as well as the study and selection of designs, technologies and experiments for CBDCs, Voorhees tweeted: “By the end of 2022 Bitcoin will already be bigger than half of them.”
With Voorhees’ vision of establishing a decentralized, immutable and borderless financial system, ShapeShift’s open-source software and governance will gradually migrate to holders of the exchange’s FOX token, which has already been issued to ShapeShift’s employees, investors and users. In 2022, every existing user will receive a FOX token airdrop of 340 million tokens, making it the largest airdrop in history.
“Decentralization has become not only a viable organizational strategy, but the essential model for enabling the borderless, immutable financial system for which so many of us passionately advocate,” Vorhees wrote on Medium, explaining the rationale behind the decision.
Advocate, Exchanges
University of Puget Sound
Being an early Bitcoin entrepreneur, espousing libertarianism, and founding crypto exchange platform
