Blur Founder ‘Pacman’ Revealed As 24-Year-Old High School, MIT Dropout
by James · February 22, 2023
One of Blur’s founders has “doxxed” himself, publicly revealing his identity, after users on Crypto Twitter began put it together earlier this week.
Tieshun Roquerre-who prefers to go after “Pacman” online-is a co-founder of ObscurityNFT marketplace backed by crypto VC heavyweight Paradigm designed for “pro traders” who are quickly took OpenSea’s place as the top NFT exchange by volume.
Roquerre is a 24-year-old who worked as a software engineer at the e-commerce site Teespring and then dropped out of high school. He then founded StrongIntro and took it through the Y Combinator startup accelerator. Roquerre then did a two-year stint at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before dropping out to found crypto domain startup Namebase, which he raised $5 million for and then sold to Namecheap within three years.
“When we were building Blur, I liked the privacy of being pseudo[anonymous]”Roquerre explained in a Twitter thread. “I would often doxx in private conversations to establish trust, or if the vibes were good.”
“At this point Pacman is synonymous with my own identity and the name is much easier to pronounce than my IRL name. I will continue to refer to myself as Pacman and use my VTuber for conversations,” he soreferring to his 2D anime-style digital avatar.
Blur burst onto the NFT scene in Octoberpromising NFT traders BLUR tokens via an airdrop in early in 2023. Following its multi-million dollar airdrop for its early adopters, trading on the stock exchange has skyrocketed. According to public blockchain data available on Dune Analytics, Blur now has an 80.6% market share among NFT exchanges while OpenSea takes around 14.5%, based on trade volume.
As Blur’s popularity among traders has increased in recent weeks, so has interest in finding out who was really behind the company. Roquerre’s doxxing begins to answer some, but not all, of the questions that users have about the NFT exchange that now dominates the space.
Roquerre is linked to Anthony Liu, who also left MIT in 2018. Liu’s Twitter lists him as CTO of Namebase, but Liu’s Linkedin lists him as co-founder and CTO of a “stealth” startup.
Roquerre’s “face reveal” comes just days after some Twitter users noticed that Paradigm also supported Namebase, where Roquerre is openly listed as the founder. Users then found his Twitter account and observed that Roquerre liked and retweeted Blur’s post.
“We always said internally that we would support what he did going forward … and are proud to see what he and the team have built,” Paradigm founder Matt Huang wrote on Twitter in response to the news.
According to Crunchbase data, Namebase was also backed by INBlockchain, a Chinese crypto investment company that claims to own 130,000 BTC.
Another Twitter user had revealed Roquerre’s connection to Blur through a tweet on Sunday, with a meme suggesting they were sad that Roquerre left Namebase to work with Blur.
