Adam Back

Adam Back is currently the CEO of Blockstream, a technology company that seeks to further the development of bitcoin and blockchain technology.

Blockstream provides funding for the development of Bitcoin Core, the predominant bitcoin network client software. It also employs a large number of prominent Bitcoin Core developers.

Having worked on e-cash protocols since 1995, Adam Back is an applied cryptographer and inventor of the hashcash proof-of-work and decentralized mining used in bitcoin. In addition to implementing credlib, he was an e-cash consultant to Nokia and later to Credentica (acquired by Microsoft).

Back was an architect and cryptographer at Zero-Knowledge Systems working on its Freedom network, a precursor to Tor. He has also consulted for leading security companies, including oneID, Vmware and QWcap.

Most recently, Back co-founded Picorp, which was acquired by EMC and where he was CSO of the company’s consumer division, Decho. Adam holds a Ph.D. in distributed systems and computer science from the University of Exeter.