“That was the first moment I thought, ‘Wow, this could do something,'” he said.
By then, Roche was in his first year at Boyes-Shiller-Flexner and had developed a reputation as a kid who understood cryptocurrencies. When a colleague in Miami contacted him just days after the journal published an article about a Bitcoin-related incident, he jumped at the opportunity.
The case pitted a man named Ira Kleiman against Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, who claimed to be the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Kleiman accused him of defrauding his brother David, a paraplegic computer forensic expert who died in his mid-40s, of billions of dollars of Bitcoin that he allegedly co-mined in the early days of Bitcoin. I wanted to sue Dr. Wright.
The facts were ambiguous. There is evidence that Dr. Wright and David Kleiman were in fact friends, and that David Kleiman had an encrypted hard drive that may or may not contain the password for his Bitcoin wallet. It was known to be worn around the neck. However, many considered Dr. Wright to be a fraudster, questioning the idea that he had mined early blocks of Bitcoin, much less tricked someone into getting Bitcoin.
For Roche, that was part of the appeal of the case. If we can turn over the files to Dr. Wright when they are discovered, we may be able to solve Bitcoin’s great enduring mystery: the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr. Roche and his young Miami colleague Berber Friedman soon began to devote most of their time to the case.
In 2019, as the Kleiman case was winding its way to trial, Roche met a new client embroiled in a dispute with a cryptocurrency firm. Within days, he negotiated a favorable settlement on behalf of his client. As a token of appreciation, the client agreed to invest $7.5 million in Roche and Friedman so they could start their own law firm. Initially, Roche set up shop in a co-working space in Brooklyn, but joined Friedman in Miami when the pandemic hit.
Their company, Roche Friedman, quickly made headlines. Roche watched with growing skepticism that many crypto startups were riding on Bitcoin’s rising popularity to sell new digital coins whose values skyrocketed and then plummeted. It was reminiscent of the pump-and-dump scam, in which groups publicly inflate their stocks and then sell them en masse for profit.
Regulators didn’t seem to be doing anything about it, so Roche decided to do so. On April 3, 2020, Roche Friedman sold unregistered securities to seven digital coin issuers with false statements, and then threw it away while an individual investor was holding the bag. filed a lawsuit seeking class action status.
