Nick Thoma

Nick Thoma is a software engineer and entrepreneur who became a co-founder and chief technology officer of Turtle.xyz in October 2024. His profile describes Turtle as a blockchain-services company and a phantom-liquidity protocol.^[1]​^[2]​

Education

Thoma studied computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2013 to 2017 and earned a bachelor’s degree.^[1]​^[3]​

Career

Before joining Turtle, Thoma worked as a software engineer at ParaFi Capital from November 2021 to March 2024 and as a senior software engineer at Brain Corp from February 2018 to November 2021. Earlier, he completed a Pathways internship at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from January 2016 to August 2017, a software engineering internship at Epic from May to August 2015, and a software engineering internship at Fetch from February to August 2014.^[1]​^[3]​

Since May 2024, Thoma has owned Thoma Technologies LLC. His profile lists work through the company as a technical adviser to Thala Labs, creator of Ovrlook, and operator of distributed validator clusters for Lido and EtherFi.^[1]​

Robotics and Research

Thoma’s listed robotics projects include Robartender, a drink-mixing robot operated through a mobile app, begun in April 2015, and Handroid, a humanoid hand operated by a glove, begun in March 2015. He also worked on Bit-zee Bot, a two-wheeled robot with a camera and voice recording and playback, in April 2013, and a four-wheeled, webcam-equipped robot designed to track colored objects from September 2017 to December 2018. From January to August 2017, he worked on NASA’s Valkyrie, a humanoid robot used as a robotics research platform.^[1]​

Work at Turtle

Thoma described Turtle’s goal as creating an efficient market for liquidity, allowing protocols to build distribution and raise liquidity without relying on traditional approaches.^[1] Thoma said Turtle had secured more than $1 billion in liquidity across campaigns with TacBuild and Katana.^[2] In July, he described Turtle Accounts as a way to bundle social accounts and wallets under one account; Turtle’s announcement said users could link a wallet, social accounts, or email to access rewards and yield.^[2]​

On September 5, 2025, Thoma said Turtle had added support for Solana and TON wallets, extending the service beyond Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystems. He described linking wallets and social accounts to one profile as foundational to planned features.^[2]