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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.
Work Experience
Education Experience
Relevance Person
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.
Matt Leisinger
Matt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Alluvial Finance. Alluvial is building the enterprise liquid staking standard. Recently, he was the Head of Liquid Staking Products at Figment, a blockchain infrastructure company focused on building web3. Prior to joining Figment, Matt spent 12 years in the proprietary trading space, leading teams in building high-frequency, algorithmic trading systems. He was a Partner and Managing Director at Transmarket Group. Matt graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer Engineering and from the University of Chicago with a Master's in Computer Science.
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.
Yuan Xia
Yuan Xia is the Founder & CEO of Secure3. Previously, he worked for GGV Capital, Airbnb, and Facebook. He is also the Founding Director & CSO of CertiK. He graduated from Purdue University and Yale University.
Mickey Maher
Mickey Maher is currently the Chief Business Officer at Amplica Labs and was previously the SVP of Platform and Blockchain Partnerships at Dapper Labs.
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.
Jiang Xuxian
Jiang Xuxian is the founder of PeckShield, the Chief Scientist of 360, and a professor at the University of North Carolina.
Paul Stahura
Paul Stahura is the Lead Advisory Board member and Co-Founder at D3. He is an influential entrepreneur and visionary in the field of domain names and internet infrastructure. As the co-founder and former CEO of eNom and Donuts Inc, Paul revolutionized the domain name industry by leading the expansion of the internet's domain name system. Under his guidance, Donuts became the world's largest registry of new generic top-level domains (.org, .au, .business, .email, and many others). Beyond his accomplishments at Donuts, Paul has served on the board of directors for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Paul holds a Bachelor of Science and Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.
Warren Togami
Warren Togami is VP Solutions at Blockstream