Translated from the original article first published on DN.no.
Christen Ager-Hanssen spent a year in the CEO's chair at Nchain. Then he leveled several serious allegations against key personnel in the company.
"We believe this is the biggest scam in history," the businessman Christen Ager-Hanssen summarized a few hectic days from a sidewalk café in London. Nearly a year after he became the CEO of the company Nchain, he has now been fired by the board. This happened just seven hours after he declared whistleblower status and submitted a report describing "a criminal conspiracy" to drain the company of its assets.
As recently as August, Ager-Hanssen told Dagens Næringsliv that his stake in Nchain was valued at over a billion, following an investment from Canadian gambling billionaire Calvin Ayre. However, he now claims that he has been acting almost as an undercover agent in the company for the past few months: "I had to do my investigation. I had to inspect and gather evidence." Suspicion arose in June. "I began to suspect that not everything was as it should be concerning Calvin Ayre. It has been quite nerve-wracking," Ager-Hanssen recounts. In a statement on the company's website, Nchain responded that concerns related to company management and alleged "serious and inappropriate behavior" from the businessman led to the termination with immediate effect.
In the backdrop of the drama is Craig Wright, who has held the title of "chief researcher." He has been very controversial over the years, after claiming he was the one who invented the original cryptocurrency, bitcoin. In January, Wright will face a coalition of powerful Silicon Valley forces in court. Their goal is to secure a verdict stating that he is not "Satoshi Nakamoto," the alias of the individual or group behind the technology. In June, Christen Ager-Hanssen and his lawyer Zafar Ali said they believed Wright was in a precarious position. "We tell Calvin Ayre that Craig is going to lose the Satoshi case. It's very clear that he has manipulated documents. We could see early on that there were many inconsistencies," says Ager-Hanssen.
The message triggers panic in Ayre, according to Ager-Hanssen. "I can smell something burning," he says. The team sees one way out to turn the situation around. They ask Wright to unlock "Satoshi's bitcoins." These are a collection of 1.1 million bitcoins that have remained untouched since the dawn of the technology and are presumed to belong to the creator. When the bitcoin price was at its highest, these had a theoretical value of over 700 billion kroner. If Wright truly was Satoshi, he could prove it by unlocking them. "We tell Craig he needs to use the keys. He explodes. He doesn't want to use the keys. We say then he will lose the case," Ager-Hanssen says. "No comment," says Craig Wright to DN over the phone before hanging up.
Wright has previously denied all allegations of manipulated documents and has detailed technical explanations for the ambiguities his opponents claim to have discovered.
As the meeting Ager-Hanssen describes ended, Calvin Ayre is said to have executed the maneuver he had warned about. In the report, Ager-Hanssen claims that three seemingly independent deals are now being made, which in reality are constructed in such a way that they will give Ayre control over the values in Nchain.
Dagens Næringsliv has contacted both Ayre and Stefan Matthews, who is the chairman and acting CEO. A communications advisor conveys a statement from the latter. "We have not seen or spoken to Christen Ager-Hanssen since he was fired last Wednesday. Regardless of the termination, we can confirm that the board of Nchain received a report from Christen Ager-Hanssen with accusations against the Nchain group. Contrary to what Christen Ager-Hanssen claims, the board takes the accusations in the report very seriously," replies Matthews.
Therefore, Nchain has already engaged independent investigators, according to the acting CEO, who continues: "We would like to emphasize that the board so far has seen nothing in the group's activities that causes concern. We await the investigators' findings with interest."
Ayre himself has released a series of tweets clearly referring to the case: nothing more embarrassing to watch than a terminated for cause ex-CEO of a company on full social media meltdown. Hard to line up your next "host" company to prey on when this is all over the internet also. — Calvin Ayre (@CalvinAyre) October 1, 2023
Enemies Ayre and Wright have been a duo since Wright left his homeland of Australia. On the same day in 2015, the police raided Wright's home and offices, looking for evidence in a comprehensive tax case, and several media identified him as "Satoshi." Wright initially claimed he had been outed involuntarily. Then, while the media suspected they had been deceived by fake leaks about Wright, he wholeheartedly embraced the role of Satoshi. The claim has made Wright many enemies, including Kjell Inge Røkke's former crypto guru Magnus Granath, who won against Wright in a lawsuit at Oslo District Court last year, after calling the Australian a "mentally ill" fraudster. Also here, there was controversy around documents from Wright's side, and the judge concluded that Granath had sufficient "basis to claim that Wright had lied and cheated."
Ager-Hanssen is controversial for his rapid ascents and big falls in the business world, and untraditional methods. DN has previously reported how he assisted Swedish finance magnate Mats Qviberg in a major conflict, allegedly with the help of former intelligence officers.
The lawsuit in January is against the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa). The alliance has powerful backers in Silicon Valley. Behind it are Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's Block, and Worldcoin – the crypto project of OpenAI founder Sam Altman. They aim, in short, to prove once and for all that he is not Satoshi.
Last Friday, September 22, Ager-Hanssen organized a mock trial to prepare Wright, with lawyer Zafar Ali playing the role of Copa, he says. It did not go well for Wright: "He was completely crushed. Totally picked apart on all points. We told him that to win the lawsuit, you must use the keys and then you must be able to explain why you have presented fake documents. Craig panics totally," says Ager-Hanssen. — When did you start suspecting Craig Wright was not Satoshi? "I have been trying to figure it out. But I knew the technology worked. Therefore, it was hard for me to believe that he was not it. What I believed is that he was part of the Satoshi team," says Ager-Hanssen.
Craig Wright was accompanied by a Swedish bodyguard who would only identify himself as "Mike," when he was at Oslo District Court.
— I was deceived Ager-Hanssen says he does not know how much Calvin Ayre knew about Wright. "But instead, they have tried to create an image of Craig Wright as a fantastic inventor. I was quite sure that he was Satoshi. But there are evidences that turn out to be forged evidences." — You were deceived? "I was deceived." — And the values you thought you had in Nchain, can you say goodbye to them? "I think Calvin Ayre is going to buy out all shareholders. Money is not a problem for him. His problem is more about his reputation. I do not care. It will be what it will be."
Christen Ager-Hanssen says he will report the case to Swiss financial authorities first. — Is there anything criminal that will happen as a result of this? "That will come later." Now, Ager-Hanssen is relieved, he says: "I am done with this. No money in the world is worth sitting and prostituting oneself for something like this. I am paid three million pounds a year plus bonuses. But I must say, I am very glad to be out of this."
Wright has been in several legal processes where judges have reacted to his documentation. Several of these are described in a DN documentary about the dispute with the former Aker top man Granath. In August last year, Wright was flayed by a judge in London, in a similar defamation case, who concluded that Wright had forged the basis for the case deliberately. The judgement was upheld in July this year. After his dismissal from Nchain, Ager-Hanssen has publicly apologized to the main characters in these cases.
