Blockstream

We are renowned architects of Bitcoin, cryptographers, cypherpunks, entrepreneurs as well as leaders from the business, security, policy and open-source communities.

Adam Back, Ph.D.

President

Having worked on e-cash protocols since 1995, Adam is an applied cryptographer and inventor of the hashcash proof-of-work and decentralized mining used in Bitcoin. In addition to implementing credlib, he was an e-cash consultant to Nokia and later to Credentica (acquired by Microsoft). Adam was an architect and cryptographer at Zero-Knowledge Systems working on its Freedom network, a precursor to Tor. He has also consulted for leading security companies, including oneID, Vmware and QWcap. Most recently, Adam co-founded Picorp, which was acquired by EMC and where he was CSO of the company’s consumer division, Decho. Adam holds a Ph.D. in distributed systems and computer science from the University of Exeter.

Matt Corallo

Core Tech Engineer

Matt is a long-time Bitcoin developer who has been working on pioneering sidechain and Bitcoin extensibility technology since its inception. He has actively contributed to Bitcoin Core and its testing infrastructure, and to BitcoinJ, a Java implementation mainly focussed on lightweight applications. He moonlights as a Whisper Systems developer and researches secure hardware.

Johnny Dilley

Strategy

Johnny is a specialist in Applied Data Science, particularly with regards to economic and organizational arenas. Prior to working at Blockstream, he was at Pantera Capital, where he was responsible for basic research into Bitcoin, and evaluating and investing in Seed & Series A companies. Johnny is passionate about Bitcoin’s ability to solve many of the world’s problems, and looks forward to helping bring the blockchain to the masses.

Alex Fowler

SVP, Business Affairs

Alex is responsible for overseeing the company’s external affairs, including business development, communications, public policy and community outreach. With almost twenty-five years of experience, Alex is a dedicated professional focused on open source technologies, data security, Internet policy and user rights, and he advances those interests with technology, business and government leaders around the world. Alex’s past experience includes roles with PwC, Zero-Knowledge Systems, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Most recently, Alex served as Mozilla’s Chief Privacy Officer and head of public policy, leading strategic and operational initiatives on privacy, trust and security, as well as the independent organization’s public policy activities. Alex holds degrees from Brown University and George Washington University. He’s also a professionally trained cellist and avid surfer, activities he rarely engages in at the same time.

Mark Friedenbach

Core Tech Engineer

Mark Friedenbach is a software engineer, formerly a contractor at NASA-Ames Research Center, and an independent Bitcoin protocol developer. Mark’s specialties are in blockchain scalability, privacy enhancing technology and issued asset extensions to Bitcoin.

Ben Gorlick

Director, Project Management

Before Ben became involved in exploring bitcoin mining he could be found in his home state of Alaska mining for gold. He studied Computer Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage with an emphasis on distributed systems and databases. From gold miner to bitcoin miner, Ben co-founded the Bitcoin company Cloudhashing in early 2013 serving as Chief Operations Officer, which ultimately brought him to Silicon Valley. His fascination with Bitcoin’s decentralization paired well with his particular interests in Applied Data Science, Graph Theory, Automation, Complex Computation, and Cryptography. Most recently, Ben was the VP, Business Development for PeerNova. Ben is excited to join Blockstream stating, “It’s truly an honor to work alongside such extraordinary talent and open generosity, as we focus on reaching new heights in both commercial software solutions and in giving back through open-sourcing our technologies. I’ll be focusing on guiding our product roadmap. Bitcoin enables us rethink the centralized systems of old with decentralized and interoperable future through technology like Sidechains. That is a remarkable opportunity. This journey will bring about the most disruptive financial technology the world has ever seen.” Ben follows the Tao of Bitcoin in saying, “Many others will try to distract us, so let them try. We don’t have to be the first, only the best.”

Christopher Allen

Principal Architect

Christopher Allen is a veteran of the Crypto Wars with a wealth of knowledge about the history of internet cryptography, including both successes and paths not taken. That dates back to his founding of Consensus Development, where he co-authored the IETF TLS 1.0 standard and produced the first commercial SSL and TLS toolkits. After Consensus merged with elliptic-curve pioneer Certicom, Christopher worked on early smart contract technology as the company’s CTO. Though he detoured into creating internet communities, teaching technological leadership, and producing mobile apps, the lure of enabling trust drew Christopher back to the field. Recently, Christopher was VP of Developer Relations for the secure smartphone company Silent Circle. He has also taught at Blockchain University, advised multiple organizations on privacy and security, and produced a design workshop on the Web of Trust. Now at Blockstream, he is Principal Architect, working especially on blockchain standards, decentralized identity and new engines of trust. Christopher also plays the hand pan and enjoys eurogames and noir films.

Francesca Hall

Coordinator

Since joining Blockstream as team coordinator, she has become an expert in complex systems, chaos theory, system automation, and large scale organizational challenges (e.g., ensuring the Blockstream team stays on track, has a roof over their heads, and knows what’s next on the agenda). Francesca awaits the day that the blockchain provides her the means to build a tiny house on a beach in Hawaii with a garden and sanctuary for neglected animals. Until then, she is hard at work making sure the Blockstream team runs smoothly.

Austin Hill

Chief Instigator

Austin Hill is an entrepreneur and active investor. In 1994, Austin founded one of the first Internet providers in Canada, Total.Net (Sold to BCE Emergis in 1997). After that, he co-founded Zero–Knowledge Systems, the largest and most funded research company focused around cypherpunk technologies for privacy, anonymity, and electronic cash. The company also pioneered anonymous networking technology and invented cryptographic identity trust metric systems. Since leaving Zero–Knowledge in 2006, Austin has been an active angel investor, social entrepreneur focused on meaningful games and gift economies. Austin was a Venture Partner with Montreal Startup and helped create Real Ventures, Canada’s leading early stage venture capital firm. Working with executive MBA programs and as a partner with Founder Fuel (Real Ventures early stage accelerator), Austin has mentored more than 60 early stage startups. Austin has been involved in the founding of hundreds of companies as an investor, founder, board member or, more often, as an instigating participant. Austin is also a registered Jedi Knight, a magician and he loves to play games of all types.

Gregory Maxwell

Chief Technology Officer

Greg was one of the key architects of the two-way peg which makes sidechains possible. He has been a Bitcoin core developer since 2011, and is one of the most active reviewers of cryptographic protocol proposals in the Bitcoin industrial ecosystem. He has contributed to many widely-used techniques in the Bitcoin space, such as the homomorphic key derivation used in BIP32 and trustless privacy-preserving techniques such as CoinJoin and blinded proof of solvency. Greg is a long-time free software developer and comes to Blockstream from Mozilla where he contributed to the Daala video compression project and coauthored the Opus audio codec (RFC 6716). He also has over 15 years of experience developing, implementing and operating embedded systems and protocols for large-scale networking. For many in the Bitcoin community, Greg is likely the person telling you that your protocol is broken and why, but he usually feels pretty bad about it.

James Murdock

VP, Corporate Development & General Counsel

Over the past 15 years, James has played an important role in bringing great technologies and services to millions of people. While at Google, he championed several major commercial deals for the company’s core products and emerging business units, including closing the first two Chrome OS distribution deals with Samsung and Acer. At Mozilla, James set the commercial framework for Firefox OS. He led the negotiations for mobile development and distribution deals with Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, and successfully laid out the global partnership strategy for Mozilla’s WebRTC initiatives. James enjoys tackling complex problems and finding simple solutions. He is excited about the enormous potential of crypto currencies and is looking forward to defining and developing many of the opportunities that exist in the bitcoin space.

Jonas Nick

Testing Engineer

While studying Cognitive Science in 2011 Jonas started to develop a passion for Bitcoin. Witnessing how this scientific breakthrough revolutionizes human interaction, he was inspired to shift his academic focus to cryptography and data science. Jonas recently earned a Master's degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich with a thesis titled "Data-driven De-anonymization in Bitcoin." In his spare time he published vulnerabilities in Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin DNS seeder, BitcoinJ, Btcd and Ethereum on his personal blog. With Blockstream Jonas continues research on security, privacy and decentralization aspects in Sidechains. On working with Blockstream, Jonas notes, “Bitcoin removes historical power imbalances and inefficiency by enabling a truly peer-to-peer digital interaction. I am amazed about the constant stream of substantial innovations in the cryptocurrency space, from Confidential Transactions over generalized Smart Contract scripting to SNARKs and more. Blockstream has repeatedly proven to be at the forefront of blockchain research and engineering, while staying true to the principles of openness and decentralization. I believe the Bitcoin community can expect Blockstream to live up to their expectations and to continue rapidly advancing the state-of-the-art in Bitcoin.”

Andrew Poelstra

Mathematician

Andrew has dabbled in software development for the last twenty years, in open-source cryptography for ten. He became involved in Bitcoin in late 2011, and joined Blockstream cofounders Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille in developing the high-performance cryptography library libsecp256k1. While completing his Masters of Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, he wrote and co-wrote several papers about Bitcoin, practical cryptography and mathematics. Andrew's other interests include jazz piano, cycling and exploring the world. He hopes one day that blockchains will enable private and censorship-free transactions for all people regardless of their political environment.

Rusty Russell

Core Tech Engineer

Rusty is a well-known Linux kernel maintainer, renowned for his foundational work on modules and iptables. After 14 years as a senior developer at IBM, he took a six-month sabbatical to work on cryptocurrencies and hasn’t looked back. Rusty has worked on a plethora of low-level code over the years, spoken at dozens of conferences around the world and also founded the first Australian Linux conference. He continues to maintain some Linux kernel parts as a hobby, while devoting most of his time to exploring the emerging frontier of Bitcoin development.

Gregory Sanders

Core Tech Engineer

Gregory has spent the last few years as a regular contributor to Bitcoin. He was a founding author to the bitcoin.org documentation, which is now widely utilized. He has worked extensively on the open source wallet GreenAddress, improving the privacy, security, and UX of the wallet. Now, at Blockstream, he is working on the core Bitcoin technology in addition to user-facing applications and proof of concepts. He is a Machine Learning Scientist by training, specializing in computer vision and statistical natural language processing, including deep learning systems. He holds a M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and resides in his alma mater's state. When given free-time he likes to cook, play board games, and get outdoors when he can.

Patrick Strateman

Core Tech Engineer

Patrick brings deep knowledge of the bitcoin ecosystem to Blockstream. He most recently worked at PeerNova, designing and implementing bitcoin mining client software, including drivers for PetaOne bitcoin mining devices. Previously Patrick was a software engineer and systems administrator for CloudHashing, where he designed, implemented and maintained both bitcoin mining pools and software to support the operation of thousands of mining devices. And before that Patrick was at Intersango, where he designed, implemented and maintained asset exchange software, as well as integrated multiple payment processors/banks (such as Lloyds TSB, HSBC, MetroBank, Dwolla, Paxum and BZWBK) to facilitate automated accounting and reconciliation.

Erik Svenson

VP, Finance and Operations

Erik is responsible for operations, budgeting, managing growth, investor relations, financial systems and product strategy. His past experience includes 10 years in the finance industry and nearly another 10 years as a co-founder, consultant, and employee of multiple start-ups. Prior to joining Blockstream, Erik co-founded Dan’s Plan, a health technology company, and he consulted for dozens of early-stage companies on fundraising, strategy, and operations. Erik holds a degree from Stanford University and is a former CFA charterholder. He’s also a little league coach, amateur DJ and Quantified Selfer.

Warren Togami

Technical Program Manager

Warren is a multi-disciplinary operator at the nexus of technology and business who thrives in engineering, product management, open source community engagement and business development. In 2003, he created the Fedora Project, which after acquisition by Red Hat eventually grew to become one of the largest open source development projects in the world. He worked for six years as a Linux operating system engineer at Red Hat. Warren has been active in Bitcoin development since 2013. Recently, he engaged in consulting projects in business management, marketing, accounting and infrastructure security. Warren holds degrees in Computer Science and Master of Business Administration from the University of Hawaii. In his copious spare time he enjoys repairing woodwind instruments…at least he did until Bitcoin irrevocably captured his full attention.

Jorge Timón

Core Tech Engineer

Jorge Timón is a software engineer with 4 years of experience at
Indra, working on big international projects including software for several insurance companies. He contributed to the design of Ryan Fugger’s Ripple Distributed Protocol v0.6 (pre-Ripple Labs). He proposed and co-designed Freicoin. He is a contributor to Bitcoin core. He co-designed Freimarkets, a set of extensions to the Bitcoin protocol to support new features like interest-bearing issued assets, options and transitive atomic transactions with an arbitrary number of private chains. Jorge is a regular speaker at bitcoin and complementary currency conferences.

Kat Walsh

Legal Counsel

Kat Walsh is a technology lawyer with extensive experience in free and open source software and collaborative communities, with a particular focus on copyright, patent, and internet policy issues. She was most recently counsel at Creative Commons, where she was a coauthor of version 4.0 of the Creative Commons license suite. Kat is currently a board member of the Free Software Foundation, and served on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation for seven years, including a term as its chair. Her other previous work includes technology policy, open access, open cultural institutions, and community management. Kat's work has primarily involved creating legal infrastructure for meaningful access to information and civil liberties through technology, which is also her reason for supporting Bitcoin. In her secret double life, she is a bassoonist and violist, and can frequently be found performing around the San Francisco bay area.

Jonathan Wilkins

Chief Security Officer

Jonathan Wilkins is an 18 year veteran of the information security industry, and an expert in both offensive and defensive techniques. Since 1996, Jonathan has been presenting research in top tier industry forums and publications including BlackHat, CanSecWest and Phrack. Jonathan is a polyglot programmer with a preference for C and Ruby with extensive implementation experience, whether writing code solo, as part of a broader development team or as an outside consultant providing independent review. While working on a first generation network vulnerability scanners, he released the first Windows NT password cracker. He met Adam and Austin when he joined Zero Knowledge Systems as part of the research group. Since then, he’s helped Microsoft, MySpace, Zynga, Yelp and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies secure their systems. Jonathan can occasionally be found scaling walls or savoring blinding dust storms.

Glenn Willen

Core Tech Engineer

Glenn is a software engineer who has been following the Bitcoin space since early 2011. He previously worked on distributed systems at Google, including the Dapper RPC profiling tool, but is most enthusiastic about truly decentralized and open source systems like Bitcoin.

Pieter Wuille, Ph.D.

Core Tech Engineer

Pieter discovered Bitcoin in November 2010 and became a member of the Bitcoin Core development team in May 2011. Since then, he has rewritten significant parts of the reference client’s code, in particular to improve performance and code organization. He wrote Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 30, 32, 42 and 62, and is the primary author of libsecp256k1, a library for efficient elliptic curve cryptography for use in Bitcoin. Before Blockstream, Pieter worked as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google. Pieter received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Leuven, where he focused on programming language design. He grew up in Belgium, but is currently living in Switzerland. In his free time, Pieter likes throwing discs around (not the type used to store the blockchain) and playing board games.

Our Team