[5] Amir Taaki was born 6 February 1988[6] in London, the eldest of three children of a Scottish-English[7] mother and an Iranian father who is a property developer.

Taaki assisted in the creation of SDL Collide, an extension of Simple DirectMedia Layer, an open source library used by video game developers.

[16][17][18] Taaki, along with other developers from Airbitz, a Bitcoin software company, created a prototype for a decentralised marketplace called "DarkMarket" in 2014, at a hackathon in Toronto, which was forked into the OpenBazaar project.

In February 2018, Taaki created a group in Catalonia dedicated to leveraging blockchain technology to help national liberation causes such as the Catalan independence movement.

[23] In 2023, Politico reported that Taaki was working on an anarchist project called DarkFi that aimed to allow people to form organizations that collectively raise and distribute money in complete secrecy.