Inside BlockDAG’s $442m crypto maze of missing miners, unpaid employees, and breached contracts

Adam wants to know what happened to his money.

The 47-year-old restaurateur based in Australia is one of thousands of investors who backed BlockDAG, a crypto project pitched as an ultra-fast layer 1 blockchain secured by mining machines.

Over 22 transactions between April 2024 and May 2025, reviewed by DL News, Adam — not his real name — sank nearly $25,000 into the project. He was granted anonymity to speak candidly about his experience.

Adam says he was lured by BlockDAG’s flashy sponsorship deals with international football clubs and aggressive promotions — including an appearance at Las Vegas’ famed entertainment arena, the Sphere.

“You just bought into it,” Adam said. “You join these online communities. We’re all excited and talking about BlockDAG and the potential.”

The BlockDAG website says the project has raised over $440 million since launching its presale in December 2023.

In exchange, investors were pitched highly specialised cryptographic mining hardware, a token listing on over 20 crypto exchanges, and a clear allotment of BDAG tokens.

To investors, the project appeared to display many of the signs of potential success.

Now — after many of those pledges have failed to materialise, and both employees and invoices have allegedly remained unpaid, according to documents and interviews seen and conducted by DL News — many investors worry they have been misled.

“Where’s the rest of the fucking money?” Adam said.

‘Risk creating unnecessary noise’

Over the course of 13 interviews with BlockDAG investors and insiders, as well as thousands of documents and internal messages, a DL News investigation found that thousands of distinct crypto addresses from around the world participated in the BlockDAG presale — with little to show for it.

Many say they have yet to receive any mining equipment, saw commitments to list on 20 different crypto exchanges whittle down to just five, and experienced a steady dilution of their token allocation.

At least two football clubs have pulled out of sponsorship deals after BlockDAG failed to pay for multi-million-dollar contracts, according to documents seen by DL News.

Liza Van Den Berg, who worked as an executive assistant to the CEO and managed payroll for BlockDAG, told DL News roughly 24 employees are still owed over $140,000 for their work in December.

Two employees who spoke with DL News indicate that they have not been paid. DL News could not independently verify this information.

As for the $442 million raised?

BlockDAG’s leadership has repeatedly declined to disclose to investors where the funds are being held.

Indeed, several crypto deposit addresses collated from interviews with investors show that at least $110 million in presale funds was sent to accounts on the crypto exchanges Binance and BTSE.

Nearly $7 million was traded through Bridgers, a token-swapping protocol. It‘s unclear exactly where those funds went from there.

Another $5 million was deposited in the decentralised finance protocol Mimic.

This is unusual behaviour, those with blockchain experience say.

“A blockchain project should be utilising the blockchain with raised funds being stored in an auditable smart contract,” Fabrizio Giabardo, founder of the token fundraising platform Legion, told DL News.

“Otherwise, you’re inviting ill intent.”

In a brief phone call with DL News, BlockDAG’s CEO, Nic Van Den Bergh (unrelated to Liza Van Den Berg), said the company had raised more than $200 million. He declined to comment further.

“I’ve decided not to proceed with interviews at this time, as doing so would risk creating unnecessary noise during a critical execution phase,” Van Den Bergh said in another message to DL News, adding that any updates “regarding BlockDAG will be shared through official communications when appropriate.”

BlockDAG’s website also solicits investment via Visa, Mastercard, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, but the project didn’t answer questions about whether any funds were raised through traditional payments and held offchain.

Gurhan Kiziloz, the secretive founder of BlockDAG and the man behind the controversial fintech firm Lanistar, originally agreed to an interview but pulled out at the last minute.

Apart from the above, the project’s leadership did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email, WhatsApp, or phone call.

Spiralling out of control

BlockDAG was first announced in December 2023.

For its first seven months, the project’s team was anonymous.

Although pseudonymity — the use of fictitious names with established online reputations — is widely common and even celebrated in crypto, complete anonymity for project founders is often met with suspicion.

Instead, it relied on technical promises outlined in BlockDAG’s initial white paper, a marketing document intended to project its vision to investors.

A 2024 version of that document, reviewed by DL News, states that “BlockDAG presents an innovative resolution to the blockchain trilemma.” This refers to the trade-offs among security, scalability, and decentralisation inherent to blockchain technology.

The document pledged a fixed listing price of $0.05 on exchanges as well as a $100 million liquidity pool at launch to support early buyers. A deep liquidity pool at the launch of a token allows early investors in a project to sell some of their holdings without dramatically affecting the token’s price.

The white paper also indicates that only 50 billion BDAG tokens would be made available during the presale.

From April 2024, however, BlockDAG began to issue additional tokens on top of those investors purchased, called bonus coins, to encourage continued investment.

“Then they introduced bonuses, and it just spiralled out of control,” Adam told DL News. “Imagine, buy one coin, get 10 for it.”

Investors suspect anywhere from 90 billion to 150 billion tokens have been sold during the presale. The project didn’t respond to questions intended to clarify this issue.

To calm investors, BlockDAG introduced Antony Turner as the project’s founder and CEO in July 2024.

An established founder and C-suite executive with more than 20 years of experience, he soothed investor anxieties about the company’s direction.

For a period, it worked.

“Then the team was doxxed,” Will, a BlockDAG investor based in the US who invested $3,000, told DL News. “And I’m like, ‘Okay, I felt better about it.’”

“But then there were some issues.”

‘This is very embarrassing’

A common theme throughout the BlockDAG saga has been delinquent bills.

This foible persisted throughout Turner’s tenure.

A cease-and-desist order seen by DL News and issued on behalf of Inter Media and Communication, the exclusive manager of all intellectual property rights for the Italian football club Inter Milan, indicates a material breach of contract due to non-payment in June 2025.

Once the agreement was formally terminated, Inter Milan’s legal counsel issued a letter to BlockDAG, instructing it to stop promoting the project as the “official blockchain partner” for Inter on its website.

Mondini Bonora Ginevra, the law firm representing Inter Media, declined to comment. A former employee confirmed the document’s veracity with DL News.

Alpine Racing Limited, the company currently racing as BWT Alpine FT Team, also issued BlockDAG a letter in November 2025 stating that the project was “in breach of its contractual obligations under the agreement” for failing to pay $1.4 million under a sponsorship agreement.

The letter, which DL News has seen, indicates a final deadline of December 3, 2025, after which Alpine reserves the right to terminate the agreement. Alpine Racing Limited did not respond to a request for comment. A former employee confirmed the document’s veracity with DL News.

Likewise, mining machines that investors had spent thousands of dollars on also went undelivered for months, despite marketing materials suggesting the contrary.

According to an August 2025 custom product sales agreement by Goldshell, BlockDAG’s mining manufacturer, there are currently 2,550 outstanding orders for the X30 miner and 2,250 for the X100 miner.

The X30 miner costs $500, and the X100 costs $1,600, according to the agreement seen by DL News. That’s over $5 million worth of outstanding orders for the mining machines.

Roughly 20 prototypes for these machines have been shipped to the community this month, according to Reid Davis, a US Army veteran who has emerged as one of the most vocal and sceptical leaders of the BlockDAG investor group.

Davis said he’s personally responsible for $100,000 of his friends’ and family’s money invested in the project.

Goldshell did not immediately respond to DL News‘ request for comment.

Just months after signing a sponsorship agreement with the top-tier German football team Borussia Dortmund in August 2024, the partnership ended.

On social media, BlockDAG said the collaboration ended due to European crypto regulations known as Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA.

A letter from the club, reviewed by DL News, paints a different picture.

On September 27, 2024, Borussia Dortmund issued a letter stating that the club had not received an invoice for €2,007,444 under the sponsorship agreement.

“We have not received any payment, and this letter serves as notification that your company is in default of payment,” the letter said.

Borussia Dortmund confirmed to DL News that the club has terminated its agreement with BlockDAG, but declined to say why. A former employee confirmed the document’s veracity with DL News.

When Borussia Dortmund sought payment under their partnership agreement in August 2024 — after the project had raised some $65 million — internal messages seen by DL News show that the then-BlockDAG CEO, Turner, was still heavily reliant on a shadow director to execute payments.

“Regarding the payment, I fully understand,” he wrote. “This is very embarrassing for me, as I left this to our director to arrange, and it seems to have been a disaster.”

Turner confirmed with DL News via email that most salaries, miners, members of BlockDAG’s ambassador programme, third-party service providers, and recipients of BlockDAG grants had all gone largely unpaid.

“When I was CEO, only a deposit was paid towards the X100s,” Turner told DL News. “Nothing towards the X30s.”

Investor hopes that the project’s fate was in Turner’s hands, an experienced fintech executive, were dashed in December 2025.

BlockDAG’s secret boss

After weeks of speculation, Van Den Bergh, BlockDAG’s then-chief marketing officer, finally revealed the project’s long-time founder as Kiziloz.

“Anybody that thinks that we do not want this project to be successful is downright stupid,” Kiziloz declared during an ask-me-anything event on December 29, 2025.

“And I know the marketing has been a little bit rogue. But none of you would be here without my marketing!”

Kiziloz then said that because Turner had breached all of his non-disclosure agreements by slowly leaking details of Kiziloz’s role, he had been fired.

Van Den Bergh was then appointed the new CEO of the project.

“The reason we hired Antony [Turner] was because I had a few failed projects in the past,” he said.

Who is Gurhan Kiziloz?

A dropout from London Metropolitan University, 38-year-old Kiziloz’s first major fintech endeavour was Lanistar in 2019.

The company pitched a “polymorphic” debit card, one that could be linked to many other cards a user owned.

Lanistar hired approximately 3,000 influencers — including former Love Island cast members such as Amber Gill and Chris Hughes, as well as world-famous football players like Karim Benzema and Kevin de Bruyne — to promote the card to their thousands of Instagram followers.

Lord Aleem, a Birmingham-based supercar influencer, agreed to plaster Lanistar stickers on a $3.5 million Bugatti Chiron.

The venture quickly came under intense regulatory scrutiny in the UK.

The Financial Conduct Authority, Britain’s financial regulator, issued a consumer warning that Lanistar was operating without authorisation in November 2020. In 2021, the Advertising Standards Authority also ordered the company to remove “misleading” advertising that claimed the card was “the world’s most secure payments card.”

A purported $20 million raise from Milaya Capital later turned out to be a direct loan from Kiziloz’s family.

BlockDAG’s business strategy mirrors several of these patterns.

In March 2025, the Financial Services Authority of Seychelles issued a formal warning for unauthorised activity. BlockDAG allegedly moved its registration to Samoa, but the country’s business registrar shows no record of the company’s existence.

The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Labour, which oversees business registrations in Samoa, did not respond to a request for comment. BlockDAG didn’t respond to questions about where it’s currently operating from.

Internal BlockDAG messages seen by DL News that discussed missed payments also reveal Kiziloz offered to make payments via his “family trust account, Kiziloz family office LLC UK,” as well as another entity called TOMOTO Limited.

The High Court of Justice in London ordered Lanistar Limited to liquidate the project in September 2025. Companies House, the UK’s corporate registry, lists Lanistar as in liquidation.

Kiziloz had also dabbled in crypto prior to BlockDAG.

Based on comments from former staff at Kiziloz’s marketing agency, WPRO, and Lanistar, a Financial News report from June 2024 indicates that Kiziloz promoted several controversial memecoins, including one called Big Eyes.

The price of Big Eyes has fallen nearly 98% since its inception, according to data platform CoinGecko. The platform also includes a warning that the creator of the token contract can make changes to the digital asset, such as creating new tokens, transforming tokens, or disabling selling.

Kiziloz didn’t respond to questions about those reported endeavours. Yet he seemed to recognise that his past endeavours might reflect poorly on his reputation during the December AMA.

“I didn’t want to taint [BlockDAG] by not giving it the right chance by having myself on there,” Kiziloz told BlockDAG investors in December, referring to why he’d concealed his identity for so long.

“This project is a matter of honour and pride,” he said. “Again, anyone that thinks it’s not going to be successful is downright stupid.”

Zero hour

During the December AMA, Kiziloz revealed that the presale would conclude for investors on January 26.

A week later, the mainnet would launch, he said. Yet, it seemed like not everyone was onboard with the rollout.

“That’s a little bit aggressive,” Jeremy Harkness, BlockDAG’s chief technical officer, said during the AMA.

Harkness outlined that the development team needed to add the staking component to the project, then conduct full audits. Miners that secure the network still need to be shipped and tested, too, Harkness said.

The project’s GitHub repository shows moderate activity, but it does not reflect a large developer network, as one would expect for a layer 1 blockchain. Several repos have not seen any developer activity for several months.

To be sure, expedited or delayed project timelines, on their own, do not necessarily constitute fraudulent activity.

“But, Jeremy, early February we’ll be listing, right?” Kiziloz insisted.

Listing a project’s token on an exchange is a crucial milestone, as it makes the token available to a much wider investor base and allows early investors to sell their holdings.

“We can do that, but we will have to put off a lot of other things we’ve had planned,” Harkness replied. He didn’t expand on what those other things were. Harkness did not immediately respond to DL News’ request for comment.

Meanwhile, investors have had enough.

In a Facebook group of thousands of BlockDAG investors, Davis, a community lead for the BlockDAG investors, posted on January 14 a how-to guide for filing a financial complaint with VARA, the United Arab Emirates financial regulator, where Kiziloz and Van Den Bergh presumably reside.

Others are sharing details about how to contact authorities in the UK and the US.

“Look, we’re at zero hour,” Davis said.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at liam@dlnews.com.