When Gurhan Kiziloz decides something isn’t working, he doesn’t convene a meeting. He acts. Earlier this year, BlockDAG’s CEO was removed. Several staff followed. The decision was swift, unilateral, and entirely characteristic of a founder who has built his reputation on a simple principle: performance is non-negotiable.
BlockDAG is Kiziloz’s entry into blockchain, a sector littered with abandoned whitepapers and founders who talked better than they built. He is not interested in joining that list. What began as a seed investment has become something more direct: a project he now shapes with the same intensity he brought to Nexus International, the gaming company he scaled to $1.2 billion in revenue in 2025 without a single outside investor.
The thesis behind BlockDAG is technical, but the ambition is not complicated. Traditional blockchains, Bitcoin, Ethereum, process transactions sequentially. One block follows another, creating a bottleneck that limits speed and inflates costs. BlockDAG replaces this linear structure with a Directed Acyclic Graph, a web-like architecture that allows blocks to be processed in parallel. The result is a system designed for thousands of transactions per second, compared to Bitcoin’s seven or Ethereum’s thirty.
This is not a new idea. Other projects, Kaspa, IOTA, have explored DAG structures before. But Kiziloz is not building for academic novelty. He is building for utility. BlockDAG incorporates EVM compatibility, allowing developers to deploy Ethereum-based smart contracts on a faster, more scalable foundation. It retains Proof-of-Work consensus, preserving the decentralisation that Proof-of-Stake systems often sacrifice for speed. The goal is not to choose between security, scalability, and decentralisation. It is to refuse the choice entirely.
The blockchain space has seen no shortage of founders who promise this kind of resolution. Most fail to deliver. What distinguishes Kiziloz is not his pitch, it is his track record. He has built businesses from nothing before. He has gone through difficult periods and emerged sharper. He has made hard calls that others would have delegated or delayed. When BlockDAG needed a change in leadership, he did not wait for consensus. He made the cut and moved forward.
This is not a management style that invites comfort. Kiziloz has described himself as leading with love and a little military discipline. Those who have worked with him know that the balance tips depending on results. He does not tolerate slow execution. He does not accept excuses dressed up as explanations. He has said, more than once, that not everyone is designed to ride a rocketship. BlockDAG, like Nexus before it, is being built at a pace that will leave some behind.
The project has attracted attention, and scrutiny. Online forums have questioned its legitimacy, a fate common to any crypto venture that gains traction before delivering a finished product. Kiziloz appears unbothered. He has weathered criticism before and has little patience for noise that does not translate into results. His focus remains on execution: shipping milestones, expanding capability, proving the technology in practice rather than in theory.
What makes BlockDAG interesting is not just the architecture. It is the operator behind it. Kiziloz brings something rare to a sector often dominated by technologists who struggle to scale, or financiers who struggle to build. He is neither. He is a founder who has demonstrated, repeatedly, that he can take an idea from concept to commercial reality, and that he is willing to make the decisions others avoid in order to get there.
The blockchain trilemma, the supposed impossibility of achieving security, scalability, and decentralisation simultaneously, has been treated as an axiom for years. BlockDAG’s bet is that the constraint is structural, not fundamental. That with the right architecture, the tradeoff dissolves. It is an ambitious claim. But Kiziloz has made ambitious claims before. And he has, more often than not, delivered.
Nexus proved that Kiziloz could build in gaming. BlockDAG is the test of whether that same intensity, the speed, the control, the willingness to act when others hesitate, can translate to a different arena. The early signs suggest he is approaching it the same way he approaches everything: with total commitment and zero apology.
For those watching the blockchain space, BlockDAG is a project worth tracking, not because of its whitepaper, but because of the founder now driving it. Gurhan Kiziloz does not enter markets to participate. He enters to win. And if history is any guide, he will either succeed spectacularly or fail loudly. There will be no quiet middle ground.
That, perhaps, is the point.
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