As ZachXBT has pursued that career as a crypto vigilante, he has also kept his mask firmly in place. Online, he appears only as his avatar, a kind of platypus cartoon figure in a detective’s trench coat or sometimes a hoodie. To avoid retaliation from his many enemies in the world of crypto criminals and con artists, he has never publicly shown his face nor revealed his real name or exact age and would only speak to WIRED on the condition that I not try to dig up those identifying details.
On some of their early conference calls, McGill says, ZachXBT would not only keep his camera off but even use a voice-changer application, sometimes sounding like a high-pitched “South Park character,” as McGill puts it, or on other occasions deepening his voice’s pitch until it reminded him of something out of a horror film. “It was very odd, initially,” says McGill, who at the time worked at the crypto-tracing firm TRM Labs. “But I respected his privacy, because this anonymous guy was doing really great work.”
ZachXBT exposes so many crypto criminal scams and thefts on a near-weekly basis, often working far faster than law enforcement agencies, says Nick Bax, a cryptocurrency investigator and founder of the firm Five I’s, that Bax has wondered half-jokingly if he might be some kind of bot.
“He is a machine,” Bax says.
As part of one investigation last year where they collaborated to trace a $60 million theft from a crypto project called AnubisDAO in 2021, Bax gave ZachXBT a list of 500 transactions on a Saturday night, each of which needed to be manually analyzed along with all its connected blockchain addresses. “I figured that would keep him busy for at least a few days,” Bax says. Instead, by early the next afternoon, ZachXBT had gone through every transaction and identified which ones were tied to the theft. “I was shocked,” Bax says. “He definitely had to have been on his computer for 12 hours straight.”
Many of the results of ZachXBT’s investigations are unceremoniously posted to his account on X. Over time, however, his findings have increasingly gained attention from law enforcement agencies—several of which he now often shares his findings with prior to publication. The result has been real and growing consequences for the targets of that detective work. “As Zach has gotten bigger, there have been financial repercussions and legal repercussions,” says Taylor Monahan, a security researcher at crypto firm MetaMask and one of ZachXBT’s closest collaborators on investigations, including the $243 million theft case. “If Zach posts a thread about someone now, and it’s a good one, that person is going to get arrested.”
From Victim to Whistleblower
So how has ZachXBT managed to outrace and out-trace even law enforcement’s crypto investigators, despite having no formal training or organizational support? Even he isn’t entirely sure. “That’s a tough question. I don’t know why I’m good,” ZachXBT tells WIRED in a phone interview. He chalks it up to a willingness to work around the clock—crypto markets never close, after all—and a familiarity with analyzing cryptocurrency blockchains that comes from years of poring over those vast ledgers of transactions. “The more you look at the blockchain, like when you eat, sleep, and breathe it, it starts to make more sense over time,” he says. “You can just start to pick up on those connections. I can look at a wallet, and I can profile it and tell you if it’s a bad actor within seconds.”
ZachXBT says that familiarity with blockchains comes from his years of experience as a crypto enthusiast and trader—and as a victim himself of some of the crypto economy’s many traps for unwary investors. Around 2017, he says, he was naively buying thousands of dollars worth of crypto tokens that would all eventually tank in value—often due to so-called “rug pulls,” when a crypto token’s creator sells off their holdings and all the other investors are left with a worthless asset. “I was buying in like, ‘This is going to change the world.’ I just held it and never sold,” ZachXBT says. As a result, he says, “I was the person getting scammed.”