On 11 November 2019, Equibit Group Ltd. was dissolved. Four years of work — a published protocol, money raised from investors, software shipped and a genesis block mined — had been reduced to a closed file. Equibit’s pleadings describe what came before that day: regulatory pressure, the loss of the working code, and a co-founder whom the company now alleges was an embedded CSIS officer. What came after was the banks, one by one.
Most people would have stopped there. Most professionals never face anything like it. Chris Horlacher revived the company eight months later, and in August 2020 it sued the Attorney General of Canada over the conduct of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Six years on, the company that was pleaded as destroyed is a plaintiff in four Ontario actions, and the man who built it is still an active chartered accountant, still serving clients, and still paying for the litigation himself.
This page is about how that happened, and why it matters to anyone who cares what a security state can and cannot do to one person.
The statements of claim referenced here are pleadings and contain allegations that have not been proven in court. Where this page states Equibit Group’s position, it is labeled as such.
This piece is a companion to The Widow’s Son, which covers what was taken from him personally. This one covers the work — and what the work made possible.
What one accountant built
The record below is drawn from the Ivey Business School Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab profile of Equibit Group (last updated December 20, 2018), a contemporaneous CCN interview, and the CPA Ontario public member directory. Each line matters for one reason: it is part of why the record could not be erased.
- 2007: Bachelor’s degree in accounting, Brock University.
- 2005–2010: Auditor, then assistant manager, at Deloitte. Five years of reading documents for what they leave out — the habit that now drives every filing on this site.
- 2010–2011: Chief financial officer of Euro Pacific Canada, the Canadian startup of a US securities brokerage — he had just turned 29 when the offer came in. He learned securities regulation from the inside, which is why the regulatory pressure Equibit pleads could be recognized and documented rather than simply suffered.
- 2011–2018: Managing director of Chris Horlacher, CPA, Professional Corporation, an accounting and consulting practice. That practice is what still pays for the litigation.
- Designation: CPA, CA. CPA Ontario lists Christopher Eric Horlacher as an active member with no disciplinary history and no practice restrictions. A campaign that wants its target to look unstable has to explain that line.
Then he did something most accountants never attempt: he built a company from a protocol up.
- 2015: Equibit is founded to put peer-to-peer equity and debt markets on a blockchain. It was incorporated as Equibit Development Corporation and renamed Equibit Group Ltd. on 5 June 2017.
- 2016: The Ivey profile records a UK angel round, followed by a proof of concept forking Bitcoin. The protocol paper, Kievit-Kylar, Horlacher, Godard and Saucier (2016), is published on arXiv as 1612.06953. It is still there, timestamped, beyond anyone’s power to delete.
- 2017: The Ivey profile records a public EQB sale and a later private sale, along with a team build-out.
- Early 2018: The Ivey profile records the completion of the initial product suite, Equibit Core and Equibit Portfolio, and a genesis block mined.
The average CPA audits other people’s companies, files other people’s returns, and never sees the inside of a brokerage, a protocol paper, or a courtroom as a plaintiff. Chris has done all of it. That is not a boast; it is the reason there is still a case. By early 2018, the company had published its protocol, raised money, and shipped software. That is the point at which Equibit’s pleadings place the collapse.
What the profile missed
Whoever set out to collapse Equibit did not destroy a hobbyist who had wandered into crypto. By the time Equibit existed, he had already audited Fortune 500, mining, aerospace, defence, and pension-fund books at Deloitte; served as CFO of a registered investment dealer before thirty; and done contract CFO and controls work for organizations that look nothing like startups — a retail-and-trading house centuries older than the country he is now suing, a provincial membership organization with millions of members and multi-entity IFRS reporting, a new-home warranty regulator, a national energy retailer. The profile that fits that record is not “easy mark.”
When a client’s tools were inadequate, he replaced them. For a bullion dealer’s allocated-storage program he built the system that tracks every bar by serial number, brand, fineness, depository and customer across gold, silver, platinum and palladium, applies tiered storage rates and provincial tax, and issues statements from a live pivot; months later, the client said it was the only thing that worked reliably. For a startup that refused to buy an accounting package, he built a workbook that turns a transaction register into a trial balance, monthly profit and loss and balance sheet — still in use after the company passed eight figures in revenue. At home he and his wife joke about the “German” standard — really just his: it works perfectly, every time, forever.
Equibit was the peak of that arc. In a short window, the same hand moved from accounting systems to cryptographic ones: the protocol paper on arXiv (1612.06953) sets out a blockchain equity market, with atomic cross-chain settlement and securities-market architecture taught nowhere in the CPA syllabus. That is the work Equibit’s pleadings say was destroyed.
Killing the company did not retire the builder. He is still a practicing CPA and management consultant with active clients in 2026, and the Canada action is itself a multi-year evidentiary architecture against a state defendant — the same class of work as the systems above, aimed at a different adversary. On Equibit’s case, anyone who priced him as a founder to be collapsed misread the file.
What fifteen taught him
The career above explains how the record was built. It does not explain why the man who built it was still standing once the company was gone. For that, the record goes back further — to a forest, a canteen, and a fire he was not allowed to let go out.
At fifteen, Chris Horlacher was an Air Cadet. That year he applied for Junior Survival camp. He did not apply for the Survival Instructor’s course, which normally requires a cadet to be sixteen. Like many other cadets, he had strong apprehensions about it: cadets passed around unconfirmed rumors that some had died or gone insane during its final exam. The rumors were never confirmed. At fifteen, they did not need to be.
One of his squadron’s officers, Roger Dockstader — who later became the squadron’s commanding officer — put in an application for the Survival Instructor’s course on his behalf, without telling him. Dockstader broke the news smiling ear to ear: he had gotten him into the course. Then he reassured him that he had what it takes. Chris was a year under the usual age.
About five weeks of training followed. Then, at around 4 a.m., the cadets were woken, black-bagged, and led into a transport vehicle. Each was dropped at a site in the woods with a canteen, some matches, and the clothes on their back. The rules were short and unforgiving: leave your site, let your fire go out, or commit any one of a dozen other breaches, and you failed on the spot. The exam ran five days — two as a group, then three alone.
The solo stretch, in his words, was somber, a bit scary, and incredibly taxing. Some peers went to pieces and abandoned their sites. At one point sleep deprivation caught up with him: he passed out, and nearly lost his fire. He did not lose it. He stayed. He finished. The white Survival Instructor lanyard he earned is visible in the Air Cadet photograph in The Widow’s Son.
None of this is offered as a credential. It is the origin of a habit the later record makes visible: stay alone under load, do not abandon the position, and keep the one thing that keeps you alive burning. In the woods that thing was a fire. After Equibit was killed, it became the evidentiary file and the Canada action. A campaign that depends on attrition has to outlast its target. That is the teenager the later campaign ran into, a boy who could withstand days of complete isolation in untamed wilderness.
What it cost
Here is the same period as Equibit has documented it on this site. These are selected entries from the public record, not the full file. Read them as one person would have lived them: each one lands on top of the last.
- 2017–2019 — the company: Equibit’s claim in CV-20-00645492-0000 pleads regulatory pressure, the loss of the working code, and the destruction of the company. Operations ceased in 2019, and the company was dissolved on 11 November 2019. See The Assassination of Equibit and The OSC Experience.
- 16 July 2020 — the revival: Equibit Group Ltd. is revived. It has no operating business. It exists to sue.
- August 2020: The claim against the Attorney General of Canada is issued. See Statement of Claim Against CSIS.
- January 2021: The action against Christian Saucier, David McFadzean and others is issued as CV-21-00654929-0000. See Statement of Claim Against Saucier et al.
- After 2019 — the banks: Banking and payment services close one after another. Equibit records the closures as institutional pressure timed to the litigation. See De-Banking and Institutional Pressure and De-Banked Again: Wise and Revolut.
- 2022–2023 — the judgment: Justice Myers grants default judgment against Sergei Sachkov on 5 October 2022, and damages of $1,744,711 are assessed on 21 December 2022. Justice Merritt sets both aside on 12 May 2023, and the Divisional Court refuses leave to appeal. See Default Judgment Against Sergei Sachkov Overturned and CJC Complaint 26-0478.
- 2025 — the takeover: Equibit pleads that the attempted takeover of the company was timed to CSIS discovery and aimed at ending the Saucier action and taking control of the CSIS action. See The Assassination of Equibit: Phase Two and Statement of Claim Filed Against Marc Godard (CV-26-00015305-0000).
- 2025–2026 — the machines: Seven categories of technical interference are documented, including TR-069 router compromise, DNS interception, the July 2026 website intrusion, negative SEO, and impersonation sites. See Seven Documented Technical Attacks and DNS Man-in-the-Middle.
A company. A judgment worth $1,744,711. Ordinary banking. Control of his own lawsuits, nearly. Each of those, by itself, ends most people’s fight. Equibit Group’s position is that these events are not unrelated misfortunes. They are one campaign, and its purpose was to remove the company and its founder as a functioning party — to leave behind a man who looked unstable and alone. No court has ruled on that position. The pleadings set it out, and the documents on this site are the record behind it.
What did not happen
A campaign that aims to make a target disappear is measured by what is left of the target afterward. Here is what the public record shows is left.
- The plaintiff still exists. A dissolved company was revived and has been a plaintiff for six years. The Statement of Defence of the Attorney General is on file. See AG Statement of Defence.
- The litigation is funded — by one man. Chris Horlacher alone pays for the CSIS action and the Saucier action. Marc Godard never contributed a dollar to them.
- The case reached discovery. On 25 July 2025, the Attorney General wrote that a CSIS officer from Litigation and Disclosure would attend examination. See CSIS Forced Into Discovery.
- The access request was upheld in part. In file 5820-01949, the Information Commissioner found the complaint well founded on the improper withholding of page 1. CSIS made a supplementary release on 3 March 2026. The remaining exemptions were upheld. See The ATIP and OIC Experience.
- The Crown has moved to seal information. The Attorney General has applied to the Federal Court under section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act to keep redacted information in the production from being disclosed. See AG Seeks Section 38 Secrecy Order.
- New actions have been filed. CV-26-00015305-0000 against Marc Godard was issued on 31 July 2026, and CV-26-00017856-0000 against Nathan Wosnack and Ubitquity, LLC on 8 September 2026.
- The professional standing is intact. He remains an active CPA, CA with no disciplinary history, and in 2026 he still serves accounting and consulting clients.
The skills in the first section are the skills that kept this alive. The auditor reads the production for what it leaves out. The former brokerage CFO knows how securities regulation works from the inside. The practitioner keeps records, and keeps earning the money the litigation runs on. The builder who shipped a protocol built, instead, a court file and a public archive. Equibit’s position is that the capacity that went into the company was redirected into the case — the opposite of what the campaign was designed to achieve.
Draw your own inference
On one side, the record shows the security service of a Five Eyes country, the Attorney General of Canada, and the resources of the Crown. On the other, it shows one accountant, paying his own way from a small pueblo near Mexico City.
If the conduct pleaded in CV-20-00645492-0000 happened, it did not end with a quiet insolvency and a founder too depleted to sue. It ended with a plaintiff who has funding, a designation, a documentary record, and a habit of filing. That plaintiff has kept a CSIS action alive through a set-aside default judgment, a refused leave application, an attempted takeover, and the loss of ordinary banking. The record now includes discovery of a CSIS witness, a partly successful complaint to the Information Commissioner, and a section 38 application by the Crown to keep information secret.
Whether CSIS directed or influenced what happened to Equibit is for the court to decide on the evidence. But the asymmetry is already on the record, and readers can draw the obvious inference themselves: if that was the job, the alliance behind it bit off more than it could chew. Equibit Group’s position is that an operation which fails to silence its target produces exactly what an intelligence service least wants — a litigant with standing, a court file, and a public archive.
Why this should matter to you
Skilled, documented resistance to a security state is rare, and it is fragile. It usually does not survive the first bank closure, let alone the fifth. When it does, it rests on one person’s income, one person’s records, one person’s refusal to stop.
If liberty still matters under a security state, this is what one skilled professional looks like when the apparatus tries to switch him off and fails to finish the job. The pleadings and the court record are the proof. The lesson is not that he is special. It is that one sufficiently capable individual can hold the national security state to account in open court, and that he should not have to do it alone. The boy who kept a fire alive at fifteen is still keeping this file alive. As he puts it: “I’m still alone in the woods, tending my fire.” You can help: read the pleadings, follow the case, share the record, and, if you are able, support the litigation itself on the Take Action page. Back the case; don’t clap for the résumé.
Place in the Equibit Lawsuit
This page is context for all four Ontario files: CV-20-00645492-0000 (Equibit Group Ltd. v. AGC et al.), CV-21-00654929-0000 (Equibit Group Ltd. v. Christian Saucier et al.), CV-26-00015305-0000 (Equibit Group Ltd. v. Marc Godard), and CV-26-00017856-0000 (Equibit Group Ltd. and Chris Horlacher v. Nathan Wosnack and Ubitquity, LLC). It sets out who is bringing those actions, what he did before them, and what remains of the company the pleadings describe as destroyed. It makes no new allegation. Its companion, The Widow’s Son, covers the personal history.
Further Reading
- The Widow’s Son
- The Assassination of Equibit
- The Assassination of Equibit: Phase Two
- Statement of Claim Against CSIS
- CSIS Forced Into Discovery
- Five Things the OIC Final Report Established
- Seven Documented Technical Attacks Against Equibit and Chris Horlacher
- Statement of Claim Filed Against Marc Godard
- Marc Godard’s Failed Coups
- The Crown Wants It Kept Secret
