Namecoin is developed by an international team of academics and volunteers working to protect free speech online and save the world from an Orwellian surveillance state.

Note that you should not blindly trust OpenPGP fingerprints listed on this page. Verify them via a variety of sources/methods.

Daniel Kraft (domob)

Chief Namecoin Scientist

Daniel is our lead C++ developer, currently working on Namecoin Core. Daniel is also our specialist for identity applications, being the author of NameID, the Bitmessage Namecoin integration, and the OTR Namecoin integration. Daniel has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Graz in Austria.

Ryan Castellucci

Lead Security Engineer

Ryan is our security specialist and all-around-badass, handling everything from web infrastructure to C++ development to crisis management.

Jeremy Rand (biolizard89)

Lead Application Engineer & Community Organizer

Jeremy is our .bit application specialist, and works on our codebases relating to TLS, Tor, and SPV, among other projects. Jeremy also handles fundraising (along with Phelix), represents Namecoin at conferences, and acts as our build engineer. Outside of Namecoin, he has a background in console game hacking (in particular, synchronizing multiple game consoles with each other and with virtual reality hardware) and educational robotics. Jeremy has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and is a member of the State Sponsored Actors Club.

OpenPGP (primary): 5174 0B7C 732D 572A 3140 4010 6605 55E1 F8F7 BF85 (download public key)

OpenPGP (Gitian signer): 9CDA F04A 7290 3BFE C095 9DBE 2DBE 339E 29F6 294C (download public key)

OpenPGP (Git signer): 0729 7809 7FC1 25E6 685B CE40 FD75 50C2 EB80 0711 (download public key)

OpenPGP (Jekyll signer): 9405 8478 534E 143D 1E78 A6BB 5E23 7E1F 50A5 A878 (download public key)

Ricochet: ricochet:ujb6mp55tlzfpfdi

Cwtch: degdcodd2fhlpv6so3ewyh2dcsyg4732ujauuzx63t7qlavumnyt4uyd

Brandon “Brando” Roberts

Lead C++ GUI Engineer

Brandon is a hacker with a background in independent journalism and machine learning who works on Namecoin-Qt. In addition to his work on Namecoin Core, he maintains a Namecoin port of Bitcore, Bitcore-Namecoin. When he’s not on his computer he’s probably skateboarding.

Joseph Bisch

Lead Porting & Reproducible Build Engineer

Joseph works on porting Bitcoin software to Namecoin, and also specializes in reproducible builds. Outside of Namecoin, he has done development work relating to Bitcoin wallet software, the Gitian reproducible build tool (his contributions are primarily used by The Tor Project), and the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

Andrew Colosimo (Snailbrain)

Developer & Community Organizer

Snailbrain (who prefers his pseudonym) is an IT specialist who initiated the creation of Namecoin-Qt alongside Mikhail, and was the main funder of Namecoin development during most of 2013; he also contributes to testing and development. Snailbrain is also the creator of the Huntercoin concept, which is currently Namecoin’s only fork. Huntercoin’s current development has improved Namecoin on many levels with the help of the coding expertise of Daniel.

Cassini

OS X Maintainer

Cassini (working under a pseudonym) holds the reins in the Mac OS X world. He is another dauntless tester and one of our blockchain watchdogs.

Peter Conrad (pmc)

Linux Build Maintainer

Peter uses his 20 years of Unix/Linux experience to manage Namecoin packages for the major Linux distributions. Outside the Namecoin community he is working as a freelance software developer.

Ahmed Bodiwala

Electrum Specialist

Ahmed did the initial work in porting Electrum to Namecoin. The result of Ahmed’s work (Electrum-NMC) is currently Namecoin’s flagship lightweight SPV wallet.

Aerth

cgo Specialist

Aerth did the initial work in creating pkcs11mod (a Go library for creating PKCS#11 modules) and ncp11 (a PKCS#11 module for Namecoin TLS certificates). The result of Aerth’s work was presented at the 35C3 Critical Decentralization Cluster, and is expected to become Namecoin’s flagship method of accessing HTTPS websites in Firefox, Tor Browser, and Chromium.

Lola Dam

ZeroNet Specialist

Lola works on enhancing Namecoin integration in ZeroNet, a decentralized website hosting system loosely based on BitTorrent.

Anonymous Developers

We have several developers who prefer to remain anonymous; their anonymity does not reflect the incredible impact their contributions have made to Namecoin. We are deeply grateful for their work.

Former Developers

We have several developers who are no longer active in the community, listed below.

Mikhail Sindeyev (thecoder)

Mikhail (then acting under a pseudonym) was our lead C++ developer for roughly a year (prior to Daniel), working on namecoind and creating Namecoin-Qt. Mikhail was a PhD student at Moscow State University. In 2014 Mikhail tragically died of a stroke at the age of 29. His identity was made public shortly after his death so that his great contribution to free speech technology would be recognized.

Phelix

Phelix (a pseudonym) was community organizer and lead Windows developer. He worked on namecoind, Namecoin-Qt, NMControl, and other projects such as ANTPY. He is mostly retired but occasionally comments from the sidelines.

Khalahan Henkh (khal)

Khalahan (a pseudonym) was our lead C++ developer for roughly two years (prior to Mikhail), working on namecoind and creating NMControl. Khalahan is currently retired.

Vincent Durham (vinced)

Vincent (a pseudonym) was the creator of Namecoin, forking Bitcoin’s code to create the first solution to Zooko’s Triangle. Vincent is currently retired.

Pre-Genesis

Several people contributed research that directly evolved into Vincent Durham’s creation of Namecoin.

Appamatto

Appamatto is the author of the BitDNS and BitX proposals in 2010, which proposed using a Bitcoin-like consensus protocol for non-currency applications such as DNS-like functionality. BitDNS was later implemented as Namecoin; BitX was later implemented as Ethereum.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron was the author of the Nakanames proposal in 2011, which was later implemented as Namecoin. Aaron is well-known for co-creating RSS, Creative Commons, Demand Progress, and Reddit. Aaron was murdered by the U.S. government in 2013. The atomic unit of NMC, the swartz, is named in Aaron’s honor.

Theymos

Theymos proposed that Appamatto’s BitDNS design utilize a native token-like currency instead of only names. Theymos’s proposal is responsible for non-miners being able to trustlessly register Namecoin names.

Dan Kaminsky

Dan suggested to Aaron that Zooko’s Triangle, if accurate, constituted an impossibility proof of Bitcoin, because a currency and a naming system reduce to the same problem. Dan’s insight directly led to Aaron proposing Nakanames, which used a Bitcoin-like system to solve Zooko’s Triangle. Dan is well-known for discovering and coordinating a fix for a large-scale DNS cache poisoning vulnerability, and for being one of the Recovery Key Share Holders for the ICANN root zone.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi invented AuxPoW mining, which he proposed in order to allow BitDNS and Bitcoin to share miners while using separate blockchains. Satoshi is well-known as the inventor of Bitcoin.

Zooko Wilcox

Zooko formalized the problem of Zooko’s Triangle, which specified three properties of a naming system that were considered desirable, while conjecturing that only two could be achieved by any given naming system. Namecoin was the first naming system to achieve all three. Zooko is well-known for his work on the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store and for being a co-founder of the Zcash anonymity-focused cryptocurrency.