Roger Ver ready to fight over $50M in BTC taxes

Bitcoin Jesus is arguing that the Department of Justice’s tax fraud charges are “unconstitutional”

share


This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


Bitcoin Jesus will not go quietly into the night…or pay $50 million in alleged unpaid taxes. 

Roger Ver, who was arrested in Spain in April of this year, is arguing that the Department of Justice’s tax fraud charges are “unconstitutional.” 

The DOJ filed a “defective indictment,” Ver’s lawyers say, that misquotes communications between Ver and his legal teams and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — “hangs on a semblance of regulatory clarity that never existed.”

Ver’s defense claims that Bitcoin Jesus tried to get ahead of the murky tax code in 2014 (which, to be fair, is still a bit unclear 10 years on) by hiring an unnamed law firm to consult on his decision to leave the US. As part of that, they conducted a hypothetical scenario where Ver sold all of his holdings, but the thing is, as Ver’s lawyers explained, he couldn’t sell his bitcoin back in 2014. 

“On March 2, 2014, however, such a sale was likely impossible as a technological matter and catastrophic as a matter of market value. At the time, BTC was a thinly traded market with a limited number of active traders,” the filing said. And, unfortunately, the only marketplace to really sell off large amounts of bitcoin was Mt. Gox — which had just collapsed. 

So Ver, along with multiple tax experts and attorneys, had basically tried to calculate unrealized gains and exit taxes with all that in mind. Per his lawyers, Ver was also exploring the cost if he was personally on the hook for bitcoin held by his companies.

Obviously, with this being a tax case, there’s a lot of back and forth about the unrealized gains, and Ver’s previous communications regarding his bitcoin sales and how he recorded his bitcoin holdings. But essentially, the motion to dismiss falls back on the fact that the current tax code — and by current, I also mean the framework that existed in 2014 — didn’t really account for crypto. 

The indictment relies “on impermissibly vague laws that, at all relevant times, provided no basis for a person of reasonable intelligence to understand the proper application of tax laws to digital currencies; and they rely on the government’s persistent trampling on basic rights and notions of fair play,” his team argued.

The timing of this filing is what’s really interesting. Ver is set, as of right now, for a trial in lower Manhattan starting in early February of next year that could see him potentially extradited to the US. We’ve talked endlessly about the incoming administration and its seemingly favorable view of crypto and Manhattan prosecutors, to this point, are already reducing the amount of crypto cases they go after.

Whether or not Bitcoin Jesus can succeed in getting his case tossed is up to the judge at this point, but I bet his team feels there couldn’t have been a more perfect time for this filing.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

  • Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
  • Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
  • Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
  • 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
  • Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
  • The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
Tags

Upcoming Events

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Research

article-image

A wild BearWhale has also been spotted more than 10 years after the original

article-image

Stablecoins haven’t yet gone mainstream, and at least one roadblock can be solved when regulatory clarity is finalized

article-image

Pantera’s Jiang thinks that AI is going to become as important to our everyday lives as the internet is today

article-image

“Every asset manager and bank doing ‘crypto’ is earning insane fees for putting things ‘onchain,'” read a slide from Meltem Demiror’s DAS talk

article-image

The move from the national bank regulator came after increased pressure from Republicans

article-image

Industry leaders at DAS sounded off on the SEC’s approval of solana futures ETFs and how the crypto industry could expand into futures products