Erik Voorhees

Erik Tristan Voorhees is an American startup founder. He is co-founder of the bitcoin company Coinapult, worked as Director of Marketing at BitInstant, and was founder and partial owner of the bitcoin gambling website Satoshi Dice (subsequently sold in July 2013 to an undisclosed buyer).

Originally from Colorado, Voorhees later moved to Dubai, Panama, New York City and New Hampshire, becoming a participant in the Free State Project. According to a US court order in a SEC case, Voorhees is a US citizen as of 3 June 2014. Voorhees keeps his assets and finances in bitcoin.

Voorhees is the founder and former CEO of Coinapult, a company that transfers bitcoin via SMS and email. He previously founded Satoshi Dice. Voorhees' company SatoshiDice has been criticized for its high level of gambling traffic, which vastly increased the amount of data stored in the bitcoin "block chain". On March 8, 2013, he was interviewed on noted financial commentator Peter Schiff's podcast by Tom Woods about bitcoin as an alternative currency. He appears a number of times in the film Banking on Bitcoin, including in the opening shot.

In July 2013, Voorhees sold Satoshi Dice to an anonymous investor for 126,315 bitcoins, valued at $11.5 million US (valued at $656,800,000 US as of April 28, 2019), and described as the "first big Bitcoin acquisition". He was fined US $50,000 by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling unregistered securities.

Voorhees and Charlie Shrem ran BitInstant which counted the Winklevoss twins as investors.

Vorhees was investigated by the SEC for his involvement with Salt Lending Platform's Initial coin offering and the SEC investigated if his serving on Salt's board violated the terms of his earlier settlement 2014 with the SEC. Voorhees noted he was an early contributor but not longer serves in any formal capacity with Salt.

In 2019 Voorhees commented Facebook's Libra (cryptocurrency) was a sign of a maturing industry and he would consider supporting it at Shapeshift.