2019 Speakers & Mentors
Christian Decker
Christian is an engineer at Blockstream where he works on the specification and implementation of the Lightning Network. He has been a contributor to Bitcoin since 2009.
Neha Narula
Neha is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. Her areas of interest include distributed systems, databases, and programmable money.
Matt Corallo
Matt has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since 2011. Some of his projects include: the Elements Sidechain, the Bitcoin FIBRE project, and Rust-Lightning.
Giulia Fanti
Giulia is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University where her research interests span the algorithmic foundations of blockchains, distributed systems, and privacy-preserving technologies.
Andrew Poelstra
Andrew is the Director of Research at Blockstream and a contributor to Bitcoin since 2011. His areas of interested include Mimblewimble, scriptless scripts, libsecp256k1.
Alex Bosworth
Alex is the lightning infrastructure lead at Lightning Labs. Previously, he created some of the most popular examples of lightning applications including yalls.org, htlc.me, and submarineswaps.org.
John Newbery
John works at Chaincode Labs and has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since 2016. He set up Bitcoin Optech in 2018 to help Bitcoin companies adopt scaling technologies.
Gregory Sanders
Gregory works at Blockstream where he focuses on production federated sidechains connected to the Bitcoin network. A part-time contributor to Bitcoin Core, he is interested in practical wallet technology and security.
Suhas Daftuar
In 2014, Suhas co-founded Chaincode Labs to create a place for engineers and scientists to support the development of decentralized digital currencies and further our collective understanding of how such technologies can work.
Kalle Alm
Kalle is a Swedish developer and Bitcoin Core Contributor since 2016 who has authored BIPs 98, 116, 117, 154, 178, and 322. He currently works as a manager at Digital Garage.
Jonas Nick
Jonas is a researcher at Blockstream working on the Liquid network. His areas of interest include secp256k1, scriptless scripts, and blind signatures.
Sjors Provoost
Sjors is a physicist turned software developer and Bitcoin enthusiast. He focused on developing the the web wallet at Blockchain.info from 2014-2017 and has been contributing to Bitcoin Core since mid-2017.
Jonas Schnelli
Jonas is a Bitcoin Core developer and the co-founder of Bitbox. He also develops and created libbtc, a Bitcoin library written in C.
Russ Yanofsky
Russ is a software developer at Chaincode Labs. He previously worked on web search at Google and set-top video software at Videon Central, Inc.
Alex Morcos
Alex discovered his passion for Bitcoin in 2012, and in 2014 he co-founded Chaincode with Suhas. He has enjoyed contributing to Bitcoin Core and learning about the exciting nascent field of cryptocurrency ever since.
Fabrice Drouin
Fabrice worked on large-scale distributed systems in the security industry before he discovered Bitcoin in 2012 and co-founded ACINQ in 2014, one of the companies building and deploying the Lightning Network.
Johan Torås Halseth
Johan is an engineer at Lightning Labs, where he works on LND, Neutrino and other projects in the golang Bitcoin stack. He discovered Bitcoin in 2015 and has been annoying people with the topic ever since.
René Pickhardt
Rene is an independent Lightning Network Protocol developer. He works on an open source book about the Lightning Network and runs a YouTube channel devoted to teaching about the Lightning Network Protocol.
Carl Dong
Carl is a developer at Chaincode Labs where he contributes to rust-bitcoin and Bitcoin Core. He is excited about systems engineering and incentive-compatible uses of permissionless money.
Will O'Beirne
Will is an open source Lightning developer who created Joule and the WebLN standard. He's currently focused on projects and tools to make Lightning development awesome.
Samuel Dobson
Samuel is a PhD student at the University of Auckland, focusing on cryptography. He has been contributing part-time to Bitcoin Core since 2017 and is the wallet maintainer for the project.