Developers in Crypto

Developers are an essential part of the crypto ecosystem as their contributions pave the way for future ahead.

Engineering is “Deep Work,” and it needs a lot of research and planning. Away from Twitter debates, these developers keep their heads down and get the job done for all of us.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code — Linus Torvalds

We want to recognize the efforts of these developers so we are starting a series “Developers in Crypto“, where we will discuss some awesome Crypto/Blockchain/Web3 developers and their work.

Note: This is not a comparison or competition and we did not follow any particular order while mentioning a specific developer.

Wladimir J. van der Lann (laanwj) – Bitcoin

Wladimir is the lead maintainer of Bitcoin maintainer and the most active Bitcoin-core developer.

On April 8, 2014, Andresen (Bitcoin core developer and maintainer) stepped down, and Wladimir van der Laan agreed to take over as Lead Maintainer of the Bitcoin-core project.

Wladimir completed his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He mostly writes about computer-related hardware in his blog, and you can follow him on Twitter.

Many popular cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin fork, Wladimir is the most repeated top contributor in CoinCodeCap database.

James Lee(jl777) – Komodo

James lee heads Komodo’s development. Komodo is one of more under-appreciated cryptocurrency in terms of technical innovation.

James contributed many elegant innovations such as atomic swaps and multichain architecture (smart chains), Delayed Proof of Work (dPow), adaptivePoW on Komodo blockchain.

Before starting Komodo, James was working on a project called SuperNET on Nxt.

In terms of contribution, James is on the top in our CoinCodeCap database. He doesn’t have any social media accounts but he is pretty approachable on Komodo’s discord and you can follow his blog on Medium.

Gavin Wood — Ethereum/Polkadot

Gavin co-founded the Ethereum project and invented solidity language.

Gavin also coded the first POC (Proof of Concept) for Ethereum and wrote the yellow paper which is a formal specification of Ethereum blockchain.

In 2015, Gavin co-founded Parity Technologies (then called Ethcore) which currently maintains Ethereum Parity client.

Parity Technologies are also working on a new blockchain network named Polkadot, which is a multichain platform. He often writes on Medium, and you can follow him on Twitter.

Gavin contributed to multiple repositories in across Ethereum ecosystem, and he is one of the top 5 contributors in our CoinCodeCap database.

Pieter Wuille (Sipa) — Bitcoin

Pieter holds completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Leuven.

After discovering Bitcoin in 2010 and Pieter has been a Bitcoin Core developer since May 2011. Wuille also co-founded Blockstream, which significantly contributes to Bitcoin-core project.

In 2012, Wuille published BIP 32, introducing hierarchical deterministic wallets to Bitcoin which is now a widely adopted cryptocurrency wallet standard.

Pieter also added segregated witness, which paved the way for many innovations such as Lightning Network and schnorr signature on Bitcoin.

Pieter also maintains a website where you can track Bitcoin metrics. He often writes posts on Blockstreams blog. Here is Pieter’s Github and you can follow him on twitter.

Olaoluwa Osuntokun (@roasbeef)

Olaoluwa Osuntokun(Laolu) is Co-founder and CTO @ LightningLabs. He is the lead developer of lnd, one of the main implementations of Lightning.

Laolu has been a Bitcoin developer for over 4-years, is an author of several BIPs (BIP 157+158), and conducts active research into the future operation and evolution of the Lightning Network.

Forbes recognized Olaoluwa as 30 Under 30 in 2019. He received his B.S and M.S in CS from UCSB where he studied applied cryptography.

You can follow him on twitter.

Wrapping up

Satoshi Nakamoto underpinned the new age of Decentralization. Since then, thousands of developers joined this revolution.

Crypto is full of technological innovations, and all thanks to these developers/researchers and their thirst to build open systems which are empowering millions of people.

The continuous effort of these developers can’t be unrecognized. We will continue to highlight their contribution to building cryptocurrencies we love and HODL.

Read our latest blog post, where we analyzed Bitcoin codebase.

About CoinCodeCap

CoinCodeCap analyzes codebase of various cryptocurrencies. Anyone can showcase development activity on their platform using our APIs.

We also help in development audit reports for Cryptocurrencies. You can reach us at [email protected].

Note– We are thankful to James Lee (jl777) from Komodo for supporting this work.