Gregory Maxwell

Gregory Maxwell is an American computer scientist, a bitcoin core developer and the former chief technology officer of Blockstream. Maxwell was also an early contributor to Wikipedia and was previously employed at the Mozilla Foundation.

Maxwell, along with several others, founded Blockstream 2014 to build financial infrastructure and applications based upon bitcoin. In 2014, Blockstream raised $21 million to help push forward bitcoin’s development and to work on ‘sidechains’ that could facilitate the transfer and exchange of assets from bitcoin to other blockchains, and could also help bitcoin scale its transaction capacity.

However, Blockstream has historically been a contentious organization within the crypto community. Some in the community have asserted that Blockstream is a threat to bitcoin’s decentralized nature, while others praise it as a necessary given that bitcoin’s core technology has historically suffered from a lack of well-funded developers.

Maxwell departed Blockstream in 2018 to focus on code developing bitcoin smart contracts.

Resources

Blockstream website

Website

Maxwell image via Lwn.net

Authored by John Metais

This article was originally published on Apr 27, 2020 at 4:29 p.m. UTC

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