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Distinct shells carrying a filed role for this person — not every shell they have ever touched.
SEC-verified vehicles of the same sponsor, predating these roles and carrying none of them. The badge counts them; the figure beside this one does not.
Mergers closed across all 3 — these vehicles and the franchise's earlier ones together.
Announced but not closed, and still hunting — again over all 3.
No closed vehicle here has both a stored price and a filed trust value to score it against.
2 vehicles on file, newest listing first
none appears on more than one · 1 vehicle carry no counterparty filing we have read
4 people on two or more of them
Dr. Adam Back is a British cryptographer, cypherpunk, and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, a leading Bitcoin infrastructure and scalability company he established in 2014 alongside Erik Svenson, Pieter Wuille, and others. Born in July 1970 in London, Back developed an early interest in computers and mathematics, programming on a Sinclair ZX81 as a teenager before pursuing an academic career in computer science. He earned a Ph.D. in distributed systems from the University of Exeter, where his studies focused on systems in which multiple computers work together without central control—a principle that would later underpin blockchain technology. During his academic years, he became deeply involved in cryptography and digital privacy, drawing inspiration from PGP and the broader cypherpunk movement, which advocated for strong encryption as a means of individual self-sovereignty over data, money, and communication.
Back's most enduring technical contribution is the invention of Hashcash in 1997, a proof-of-work system originally designed to combat email spam by requiring senders to solve a small cryptographic puzzle before transmitting messages. The system introduced the concept of digital scarcity through computational power and randomness, principles that were later directly applied in Bitcoin mining. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto contacted Back to request guidance on how to properly cite Hashcash in the Bitcoin whitepaper, making Back one of the few individuals whose influence is explicitly documented in Bitcoin's foundational document. Although he has frequently been speculated to be Satoshi Nakamoto himself, Back has consistently denied the theory, and no convincing evidence has ever emerged to support it. Over a two-decade career as an applied cryptographer and security architect, Back has held senior roles at several major technology companies, including Microsoft, EMC, PI, VMware, and Zero-Knowledge Systems, and has advised numerous others on cryptography and peer-to-peer finance.
In the SPAC arena, Back served as an independent director on the boards of Columbus Circle Capital Corp. I and Columbus Circle Capital Corp. II, both affiliated with Cohen & Company Inc., a financial services firm. Columbus Circle Capital Corp. I completed an upsized $250 million initial public offering on May 17, 2025, with Back serving alongside fellow independent directors Matthew Murphy and, in the case of Columbus Circle Capital Corp. II, Marc Spiegel. Back was also associated with Embarc, where his SPAC track record reflected involvement in one SPAC with a $200 million average deal size. On February 12, 2026, Back resigned from the Board of Directors of Columbus Circle Capital Corp. II effective immediately, resulting in the forfeiture of membership interests equivalent to 50,000 Class B Ordinary Shares and leaving 200,000 Class B Ordinary Share equivalents outstanding. Marc Spiegel was subsequently appointed to the Audit and Compensation Committees in connection with Back's departure. At the time of his resignation, the company had determined that an initial Business Combination was not considered probable, with a 15% probability of closing and a marketable value per Founder Share of $9.91.
Back is based in Sliema, Malta, and maintains an active professional presence with over 500 connections on LinkedIn. He is a sought-after speaker at major industry events, including BTC Prague, where he has participated in panel discussions on corporate Bitcoin strategy and institutional adoption. As CEO of Blockstream, he continues to focus on Bitcoin scalability, infrastructure development, and the advancement of the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, leveraging his deep expertise in cryptography, security architecture, cloud computing, and open-source technology. His career spans work on e-cash protocols dating back to 1995, and he remains one of the most influential figures in the digital asset industry, recognized for bridgi
This record is keyed to SEC CIK 0002068911 — the identifier this person files under in their own name. Every vehicle above is a filing made under that CIK, so “the same person on two shells” is a fact about an SEC identifier rather than about a name that happens to match.
Roles are the strings the filings used, in the order they were filed. Nothing on this page ranks them, infers seniority, or offers a reason why any two of these names recur — a recurrence is a count, and the filings that produced it are linked beside every row. We also hold 7 institutional-holder rows on these vehicles, under 3 distinct name strings, and none of them is counted across vehicles: that table has no CIK column, and matching holders by name would merge firms that are not the same firm.