“That was the first moment I thought, ‘Oh, wow, maybe I can do something with this,’” he said.
By then, Mr. Roche was a first-year associate at Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was developing a reputation as the kid who understood crypto. When a colleague in Miami approached him a few days after the Journal piece with a Bitcoin-related case, he jumped at the opportunity.
The case pitted a man named Ira Kleiman against Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who claims to be Bitcoin’s enigmatic creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr. Kleiman wanted to sue Dr. Wright for defrauding his brother David, a paraplegic computer forensics expert who had died in his mid-40s, out of billions of dollars of Bitcoin they supposedly mined together in Bitcoin’s early days.
The facts were murky: There was evidence that Dr. Wright and David Kleiman had indeed been friends, and David Kleiman had been known to carry around his neck an encrypted hard drive that might or might not have contained the passwords to Bitcoin wallets. But many people considered Dr. Wright a fraud, calling into question the notion that he had mined early blocks of Bitcoin, much less cheated someone out of them.
To Mr. Roche, that was one of the allures of the case. If he could make Dr. Wright hand over his files during discovery, he might be able to solve Bitcoin’s great enduring mystery: Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity. Mr. Roche and his young Miami colleague, Velvel Freedman, were soon devoting most of their time to the case.
In 2019, with the Kleiman case slowly progressing toward a trial, Mr. Roche met a new client, who was locked in a dispute with a crypto company. In a matter of days, he negotiated a lucrative settlement on the client’s behalf. As a token of his gratitude, the client agreed to invest $7.5 million with Mr. Roche and Mr. Freedman so they could start their own law firm. At first, Mr. Roche set up shop in a co-working space in Brooklyn, but when the pandemic hit he joined Mr. Freedman in Miami.
Their firm, Roche Freedman, soon made a splash. Mr. Roche had watched with increasing skepticism as a number of crypto start-ups rode Bitcoin’s growing popularity by marketing new digital coins that surged in value and then crashed. It reminded him of pump-and-dump scams in which a group inflates the price of a stock by talking it up publicly before selling all at once and making off with the profits.
Regulators didn’t seem to be doing anything about it, so Mr. Roche decided he would. On April 3, 2020, Roche Freedman filed lawsuits seeking class action status against seven issuers of digital coins, alleging they had pumped what amounted to unregistered securities with false statements and then dumped them, leaving retail investors holding the bag.
