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Adam Back is the co-founder and CEO of the blockchain technology company Blockstream. He invented Hashcash, the proof-of-work algorithm cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper, which was intended to be the basis for its mining function in the future. Over the course of his two-decade-long career as an applied cryptographer and security architect, he has held senior roles at several technology companies, including Microsoft, EMC, PI, VMware, and Zero-Knowledge Systems, and has provided advice to many more companies on cryptography and peer-to-peer finance. Dr. Adam Back holds a Ph.D. in distributed systems from the University of Exeter.
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Jeff Boortz
Jeff Boortz is Blockstream's Chief Product Officer, responsible for managing the Blockstream product portfolio, and has more than 20 years of product management and IT experience. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.
Sam Fang
Sam Fang is the Chief Financial Officer at Blockstream and holds a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Alyse Killeen
Alyse Killeen is a founding managing partner of Stillmark and serves on the boards of companies Blockstream, Satoshi Energy, and IBEX Mercado.
Pieter Wuille
Peter Wuille is a Bitcoin Core developer and the co-founder of Blockstream. He is ranked second in terms of commits to Bitcoin Core and is responsible for important improvements to Bitcoin such as BIP 66, libsecp256k1, and Segregated Witness. His programming languages include C++, C, Perl, Java, Bash, (PG)SQL, Haskell, OCaml, and PHP. He is also skilled in system administration, including Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, and LDAP. His specialties include programming languages, compilers, and cryptography.
Erik Svenson
Erik Svenson is the co-founder, President, and CFO of Blockstream. He has more than 20 years of experience in leading strategies, operations, and fundraising in his previous roles. He spent 10 years in the traditional finance industry in leading roles, followed by another decade as a co-founder and consultant for rapidly growing technology startups. Erik has a BA from Stanford and is a former CFA charterholder.
Steven Willinger
Steven Willinger is the Partner of Blockchain Builders Fund. Presively he was Ventures Lead at Coinbase. Product Management at Blockstream. GTM at Google. Steven Willinger graduated from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Mike Schmidt
Mike Schmidt joined the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2018 as a product manager at Blockstream and a contributor to Bitcoin Optech. With Optech, he contributes to the newsletters in addition to organizing and presenting technical content at member workshops. Mike has also contributed to Bitcoin Core by organizing events, assisting in running the taproot review sessions, and performing testing and outreach in the space. 15 years experience discovering, understanding, and developing software solutions to achieve customer needs. Success in leading multiple payment system deployments for large institutions. Rabid learner and productivity geek.
Christian Decker
Christian Decker is the Lead Engineer at Blockstream. Christian is a Bitcoin enthusiast from the very beginning, back in 2009. He got involved in the, then small, community and starting to contribute. In 2012 he was offered a PhD Candidate position in the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich. The goal of his research is to improve the understanding of the underlying consensus mechanisms and to enable the network to scale with the increasing demands. The result was the world’s first PhD dissertation about Bitcoin and the creation of a number of protocols including PeerCensus and Duplex Micropayment Channels.
Lawrence Nahum
Lawrence is working at Blockstream as Chief Architect. Previously, he was CEO and founder of GreenAddress (https://greenaddress.it), a prime, Bitcoin services company that offers the industry's first and most advanced multi-signature Bitcoin wallet. Before getting involved with Bitcoin and Blockchain Lawrence was a technology Vice President at OTC financial services leader Markitserv where he led various products and technology teams and directed other strategic initiatives for the company. Lawrence holds a first class BSc Computer Science with Distributed System from London City University.
Matt Corallo
Matt Corallo is involved in Bitcoin-related development work at Chaincode Labs and is frequently active in New York. He has been dedicated to pioneering sidechains and Bitcoin scalability technology, actively participating in Bitcoin Core development and infrastructure testing, as well as focusing on the Java implementation of BitcoinJ for lightweight applications. In addition, he also conducts research on security hardware as a part-time developer at Whisper Systems.