U.S. Intel Vets Helped Crypto Firm Soar, Unaware of Infamous Hacker behind It

By Joseph Menn / The Washington Post

13:15 JST, March 16, 2025

SAN FRANCISCO — An innovative company lionized for devising ways to crack passwords to huge cryptocurrency accounts has fallen into disarray since it began emerging that the firm was secretly co-founded by a once-celebrated hacker publicly accused of repeated sexual assaults.

The previously unreported role of Morgan Marquis-Boire in the company, Unciphered, has especially unnerved employees and contractors who held secret clearances during past work with the CIA, NSA and FBI and who had introduced intelligence agencies to the high-profile start-up.

New Zealander Marquis-Boire, Unciphered’s undisclosed co-founder, is anathema to the intelligence establishment for his work at a nonprofit that managed the troves of secret intelligence documents leaked by fugitive federal contractor Edward Snowden, now living in Russia.

Marquis-Boire has also been spurned by antiestablishment hackers who once admired the high-profile former Google engineer for dissecting high-end phone spyware. Following his work on pathbreaking anti-surveillance projects with such prominent nonprofits as Citizen Lab and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he left social media and dropped out of public sight in 2017 after he was accused in a number of accounts of sexually assaulting women.

“There is much work to be done to counter a toxic culture of sexual discrimination, harassment, and violence in many areas of the tech community, and we are fully committed to that fight,” Toronto-based Citizen Lab said when it joined the groups breaking ties with Marquis-Boire.

That ill feeling has not abated in the years since. “I take seriously the many charges of physical and emotional abuse by women who worked with him, and I’ve seen no serious attempts to repair the damage he did to so many,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That makes me very concerned about him reappearing in any position that requires trust.”

Marquis-Boire was not charged in connection with the alleged assaults, with several of the women saying in anonymized press accounts that they feared the exposure going public would entail. He declined to speak with a Washington Post reporter who approached him recently at his California home.

Unciphered’s four-year rise and fall, as revealed through more than a dozen interviews and internal documents, shows how the cryptocurrency business continues to throw people with conventional cybersecurity careers together with risky individuals at a time when President Donald Trump has said he wants the government to own the speculative instruments and make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet.” Trump held a crypto summit with industry figures at the White House on March 7 and promised to roll back regulations on an industry with a reputation for scandals.

Just two years ago, the unorthodox San Francisco company drew well-known supporters from the worlds of intelligence and hacking. Its website listed advisers including Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and chairman of the nonprofit Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Also listed as an adviser was current board member Chris Wysopal, a pioneering researcher from the 1990s hacking group the L0pht who co-founded the billion-dollar security company Veracode.

Unciphered’s business model was compelling. It used powerful number-crunching machines and brilliant code crackers from the NSA and FBI to retrieve bitcoin and other currencies that had been trapped inside digital wallets after their owners lost passwords. Unciphered reaped a share of the booty, which could be considerable given the growth in cryptocurrency values over the years. More than a dozen people lent their services to the company, many part-time, often taking small equity stakes, as Baker and Wysopal did.

The story was likewise a winner: Intelligence veterans, hackers and security whiz kids had become modern-day treasure hunters, profiting legally from the sometimes unseemly world of crypto. Favorable articles appeared in The Post, Wired and Fortune. A Netflix documentary began filming.

But many employees in key positions failed to crack the code at their own company.

The public face of it was co-founder and chief executive Eric Michaud, a longtime hacker who ran a conference on blockchain security.

Others were quieter about their involvement, in part because they did not want to advertise their abilities or possible access to millions of dollars in crypto to potential kidnappers or thieves. Unciphered company documents, email accounts and internal Zoom chats included aliases for some of the more cautious employees and affiliates.

Jon Ellch, the Unciphered labs chief who formerly worked in an elite FBI hacking team called the Remote Operations Unit, said that never bothered him. After all, he was better known in the hacking world by his handle, Johnny Cache.

One early Unciphered employee went by the name Frank Davidson. In video calls and chats reviewed by The Post, he and Ellch worked together on the bitcoin wallet vulnerability that got the company some of its biggest exposure.

Ellch and others introduced Michaud and Unciphered to U.S. intelligence agencies potentially interested in using the company’s hacking techniques for their own purposes, Ellch and another employee said.

Some employees said that after pooling information, they realized last year that “Frank Davidson” was actually Marquis-Boire, with his signature dreadlocks shorn; that he had co-founded Unciphered with Michaud; and that he owned preferred shares that gave him an extra say in how the company did business.

They expressed concern over his role, mostly in light of the reports detailing his alleged assaults on women in New Zealand, Canada and the UnitedStates. One of the articles cited a chat message Marquis-Boire had sent: “I have drunkenly sexually assaulted or raped women – the exact number of which I am currently determining.” The Post was not able to review the original message but corroborated its content with a person with knowledge of the exchange.

In a Facebook post to friends at the time, Marquis-Boire said only that he stopped drinking, spurning requests for elaboration. “Rather than have many different conversations explaining that I’m not drinking, it is more expeditious to make this Facebook post,” he wrote in July 2017.

Under pressure, Michaud resigned as Unciphered CEO a year ago, and Marquis-Boire also stopped working there.

Others learned of the New Zealander’s role in the company only in the past few months, after a delivery bill was addressed to Marquis-Boire at Unciphered.com.

Ellch said he learned from a colleague in November and pressed the board to sever all ties with Marquis-Boire. Ellch and at least one other affiliate alerted intelligence officials about the company’s history.

“I am personally very worried about the damage it could do to my career if it looked as if I was intentionally working for Morgan,” Ellch said in an interview.

It is unclear when others associated with Unciphered became aware of Marquis-Boire’s role. Wysopal, who remains at the company, told others he learned well after joining, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Erin Sowden, the company’s general counsel, likewise said she did not know when she started at Unciphered in March 2024.

“I also became aware of this identity issue with Morgan Marquis-Boire significantly after I started at Unciphered as part of my role, and I am also very frustrated,” she wrote to colleagues as word spread three months ago.

Wysopal and Baker, who left his law firm of 15 years in December, referred questions to Sowden, who provided a statement from the company: “Our current management team has prioritized building out our governance, compliance, and controls protocols. We are profitable and well-positioned for sustained growth.”

The statement said that Michaud was no longer on the board and that Marquis-Boire “has no involvement with the company, including as a shareholder.”

Marquis-Boire’s equity was bought out in January, after The Post made inquiries, according to people familiar with the development. Michaud took down his LinkedIn page and did not respond to questions.

Unciphered’s site has stopped listing employees.

“Unciphered team members are not listed on our website in order to protect against targeted attacks including but not limited to human safety, operations, and impact to customers,” the site now says. “No one who is publicly associated with Unciphered has access to company or client funds.”