Blockstream Adds to All-Star Blockchain Developer Team

Bitcoin development startup Blockstream has announced a slew of new hires that serve to further the firm’s already impressive technical team.

Covering new additions to its engineering, finance and operations and special projects divisions, the announcement formalizes some relationships that have been semi-public for months, while including other, more recent moves.

For example, BitPay open-source lead Eric Martindale, now the company's "technology evangelist", has been with the company for over a year in some capacity. Further, Andrew Poelstra was co-author of the sidechains white paper, the technical proposal for which Blockstream would raise upwards of $20m toward the end of 2014.

Elsewhere, Blockstream announced the addition of former Swiss Federal Institute of Technology researcher Christian Decker, best known for his work on Duplex micropayments channels. Decker will continue this work by contributing to the bitcoin Lightning Network, an alternative implementation of a similar concept, on behalf of Blockstream.

In statements, the startup sought to stress the diversity of the new hires in terms of subject matter expertise and geographic distribution.

The company said:

"With this new group, we're now even more distributed as a company with people working from across the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand."

The announcement follows the startup’s acquisition of wallet startup GreenAddress in July.

Image via Consensus 2016