Home The Cointelegraph Top 100 2023 Adam Back

#72

Adam Back

Co-founder and CEO of Blockstream

To the moon and Back on a satellite

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“The lack of Bitcoin is the root of all evil.”

Biography:

Adam Back is a computer scientist, cryptographer, cypherpunk and entrepreneur who laid the groundwork for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining consensus algorithm with his 1997 invention of Hashcash, which gained him a mention in the Bitcoin white paper. Hashcash was initially meant as an early control measure for email spamming and denial-of-service attacks, and it was later adopted for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency mining. Back exchanged a few emails with Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and 2009. Because of his cypherpunk background and early involvement in Bitcoin, many believe he could be Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Back received a PhD in computer science focused on distributed systems at the University of Exeter, where he became interested in PGP encryption, electronic cash and applied cryptography. He has often liaised with the masters of cryptography and digital assets, such as Wei Dai, David Chaum and Hal Finney.

Throughout his career as a cryptographer and security architect, he has worked in senior roles for major technology companies including Microsoft, EMC, PI, VMware and Zero-Knowledge Systems, to name a few, while advising many others on cryptography and P2P finance.

In 2014, Back co-founded Canada-based Blockstream with a few others, including Bitcoin developers Pieter Wuille and Gregory Maxwell. Blockstream is a Bitcoin and blockchain technology provider that focuses on scaling Bitcoin. In 2018, Back became CEO of Blockstream, where he has remained since.

Back’s 2022:

In March, after five years as Blockstream’s chief strategy officer, Samson Mow announced that he would leave the company to focus on accelerating hyperbitcoinization and promoting nation-state Bitcoin adoption. In the meantime, Blockstream and Jack Dorsey’s Block joined forces and announced in April that they would build a solar- and battery-powered Bitcoin mine in Texas using solar and storage technology from Tesla. This represented a breakthrough in Bitcoin, which has been harshly criticized over the years for emitting too much Co2 with its mining facilities.

At the Baltic Honeybadger 2022 conference in September, Blockstream announced its partnership with XDEX, the world’s first decentralized security token exchange. In November, Back and his company announced they were developing a layer-2 platform to connect developers, entrepreneurs and Bitcoiners from around the world to build on Core Lightning and the Liquid Network — Blockstream’s L2 solution created to bring more scalability to Bitcoin.

Back’s 2023:

Back believes that Bitcoin will make a strong comeback in 2023 and start growing in value again. The computer scientist will focus on developing Blockstream’s objective of expanding its satellite network capability to broadcast the Bitcoin blockchain globally for free, 24/7, and without the internet. This will help remote areas without reliable internet access use Bitcoin’s robust payment method.

Further to its partnership with XDEX, Blockstream is expected to launch the mobile app sometime in 2023. The company will focus on growing the usage of Jade, its Bitcoin open-source hardware wallet, and the Liquid Network, a Bitcoin layer-2 protocol enabling the issuance of security tokens and other digital assets. 

In particular, further developments on Liquid Network are expected, including Bitmatrix, a protocol that enables trustless liquidity provision and custom LP fees across Liquid-BTC, stablecoins and other assets. Another Liquid-based project is Fuji Money, a noncustodial Bitcoin-only lending platform that lets users borrow stablecoins and synthetic assets and trade them peer-to-peer. Blockstream has also helped grow the L-NFT protocol Raretoshi, a physical and digital art marketplace that aims to bring nonfungible token capability to Bitcoin.