Erik Voorhees: Fooling the Fox – The Story of the Shapeshift Hack

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In the short history of the Bitcoin industry, there has been an impressive amount of high profile hacks, ranging from a few hundred thousand to many millions of dollars. In all of these, customers, Bitcoin users, where robbed of their funds because poor security policies, negligence, incompetence, or plain old scamming. Recently, the cryptocurrency conversion service ShapeShift fell victim to a hack in which over $200,000 of company funds were stolen, initially by an employee, and then by a hacker to whom this employee had sold sensitive company information. Luckily, no customers lost any money as ShapeShift does not hold any funds on behalf of users.

We talked to ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees who walks us through this captivating ordeal, which sounds like it could be the plot of a movie. He speaks about how the company is trying to recover and what he has learned from this unfortunate event.

Topics covered in this episode:

• How the ShapeShift hack went down
• What steps the company has taken to avoid this from happening again
• What he learned from the hack
• ShapeShift’s long-term vision as a company and product
• Ethereum’s role in their recent growth
• His history as an entrepreneur in the Bitcoin space
• His views on libertarianism and the long-term impact of Bitcoin on that movement

Episode links:

• Looting of the Fox: The Story of Sabotage at ShapeShift
• Bitcoin.com podcast - Details of the Shapeshift.io Hack
• The Slaying of Bearwhale
• Erik's Blog

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/130