Nader Al-Naji

Nader Al-Naji is the founder of a now-defunct cryptocurrency called Basis and the social network BitClout, a tokenized Twitter. Al-Naji was educated at Princeton University and graduated in 2013. He started his professional career in 2012 at D.E. Shaw & Co., where he was an intern from May to September of that year. When Al-Naji graduated in 2013, he went on to work as a quantitative software engineer for the company until March of 2014. In October of 2014, Al-Naji joined Google as a software engineer and remained at the company for nearly three years before leaving in June 2017.

Nader Al-Naji founded Basis after leaving Google in 2017, launching the company only one month after his departure. In 2018, at the age of twenty-six years old, Nader Al-Naji raised $133 million for Basis, a cryptocurrency that was only available for purchase for eight months before Al-Naji took it off the marketplace due to tightening regulations surrounding cryptocurrencies. However, according to his LinkedIn profile, Al-Naji served as the CEO of Basis from 2017-2020.

In 2021, BitClout was launched by Al-Naji as a decentralized social media platform that is tokenizing Twitter-style posts. The site uses Bitcoin to add value to a user's social standing, with users purchasing each other's posts. Backers had invested over $100 million into the venture as of April 2021.