To his followers, Roger Ver is known as Bitcoin Jesus, a charismatic advocate of the cryptocurrency that is once again captivating investors with record-breaking gains. But to the Internal Revenue Service, Ver symbolizes a new target in the digital age: a crypto holder suspected of failing to pay taxes after selling tokens.
U.S. prosecutors
Ver, 45, is awaiting a Spanish judge's
"They don't like me, and they don't like my political views, and they just came at me every which way," Ver told Bloomberg News in an exclusive interview in late October.
Ver, a U.S. expatriate, awaits a Spanish judge's decision over whether he will be extradited to America to face tax fraud charges.
Ver said the Justice Department has ignored evidence that helps his defense and refutes a central premise by prosecutors — that he intended to cheat the IRS. Rather, he said, he relied on professionals who advised him when IRS policy on taxing crypto sales was unsettled.
"I instructed all my tax attorneys and preparers, 'We need to do everything perfectly because I don't want any problem with the IRS at all,"' Ver said. "That was their instructions the whole time."
A Justice Department representative declined to comment.
The seeds of Ver's legal peril lay in his success as an early crypto investor — long before the latest Bitcoin rally fueled by Donald Trump's U.S. presidential win. They center on his representations to the IRS and the agency's reconstruction of his holdings.
Ver grew up in Silicon Valley, founding a computer company called MemoryDealers at the precocious age of 19. He also engaged in tax protests and ran for California's legislature at 21 as a libertarian.
In 2001, he
Spreading the gospel
When crypto began, he embraced its promise for transferring wealth without government interference. He started buying Bitcoin in 2011 for less than $1, touting it at barbecues, parties and everywhere else. Intense and fast talking, he spread the vision of using crypto to buy a sandwich or even a car. When Bitcoin hit it big, Ver touted its potential from conference stages.
He co-founded Blockchain.com, a crypto company once valued at $14 billion, and was an early investor in payment processor BitPay and digital-asset firm Ripple. When the Bitcoin network underwent a software upgrade he opposed in 2017, Ver broke with the community, switching to a split-off called Bitcoin Cash. He said his current holdings include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether and Zeno.
Despite his notoriety, Ver decided in 2014 to renounce his U.S. citizenship, later becoming a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis. U.S. citizens who
As he planned to expatriate, prosecutors allege, Ver hid the number and value of Bitcoin he owned and controlled personally and through MemoryDealers and Agilestar, his California-based companies.
The IRS used blockchain analysis to determine that by early 2014, Ver and his companies owned about 131,000 Bitcoin trading between $782 and $960, according to the indictment — more than he reported in tax filings. He's accused of tax evasion, wire fraud, and filing a false tax return.
Yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of renouncing my US citizenship. https://t.co/zhQ97FbsxD pic.twitter.com/zYcmutrnxD
— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) February 5, 2024
Ver worked with a law firm and appraisers on the exit tax, but gave them false or misleading information about his Bitcoin holdings, and an exit tax return filed in 2016 failed to report the Bitcoin he owned personally and underreported the value of his companies, prosecutors charge.
The indictment also alleges Ver "fraudulently misrepresented and concealed" from the IRS the crypto that his companies sold in 2017 for about $240 million.
Ver disputes this characterization, but declined to discuss the indictment further or elaborate on his crypto holdings with Bloomberg.
A website,
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case that didn't name the parties but matched Ver's circumstances. The court dropped that case in 2023 without issuing a ruling.
>>Bitcoin Jesus has liked my tweet<<@rogerkver We're all praying for you ... and ourselves in this.
— J O E D R A G O N (@j0j0r0) November 11, 2024
Thank you. pic.twitter.com/pGAWk1qCIK
If he's extradited, Ver's case would be the first to go to trial on crypto-only tax charges. In February, a Texas man, Frank Ahlgren, was accused of underreporting capital gains from selling $3.7 million in Bitcoin. Ahlgren
Ver, who has more than 700,000 followers on X, spent years under IRS investigation as he traveled the world. In 2021, he posted a satirical
Ver was indicted Feb. 15 under court seal but didn't learn about it until weeks later, when he was at the Privacy Guardians conference in Barcelona. His
"The bottom kind of fell out of my stomach and I was like, 'Oh, my God, the U.S. is going to do this to me again,"' Ver said.
Back to jail
With his arrest, Ver returned to prison, this time to a two-man cell in Spain. Some inmates incorrectly assumed he was an American spy or undercover cop, he said.
"I didn't tell anybody in there who I was because I didn't want to get extorted or have any sort of problems with anybody," Ver said.
Spain has been a close ally of the U.S. in extradition cases. This year, Spain sent
Ver said he's spending his days in Mallorca talking to his lawyers on Zoom, practicing Brazilian jiujitsu and entertaining friends visiting from overseas. He's attended Bitcoin meetups, where he said he was well received.
Ver appeared in an HBO
"I said, 'Please, if you don't mind, don't mention that to anybody else.' He said, 'Sure, no problem.' But he had kind of a sly grin when he said that to me."