Billy Markus was born in 1983, in Portland, Oregon, United States. Known also under his Twitter/X alias Shibetoshi Nakamoto, he is an American programmer and a co-creator of the first meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which he launched in late 2013 with his friend Jackson Palmer. The duo didn’t expect that their project would take off this far, as Dogecoin was conceived as a joke poking funs at serious projects like Bitcoin and Litecoin.
Before creating Dogecoin, Billy Markus was employed at IBM as a senior software engineer. Besides this fact, little is known about Markus’ career and personal life, as the Dogecoin co-founder has largely remained out of the public spotlight. He is active on Twitter/X, where he has amassed 2.1 million followers since April 2009.