Jae Kwon

Jae Kwon is a blockchain software architect and co-founder of Tendermint, and the former president of the Interchain Foundation. Jae Kwon announced his intention in June 2021 to retire from the position of president of the ICF to focus on engineering activities. The Interchain Foundation (aka ICF) was founded with the mission to promote the vision of Cosmos, the internet of blockchains, to enable public blockchain interoperability and scalability.

After graduating from Cornell in 2005 with a B.S. degree in computer science, he worked as a professional developer in Silicon Valley, including at Alexa, and at Yelp where he led the mobile application development team. He also cofounded iDoneThis, a productivity service.

Jae has worked on numerous open-source projects, including a CoffeeScript compiler/interpreter written in Javascript, an end-to-end encrypted email system called Scramble.io, and a cryptocurrency exchange. These projects were inspired by the cryptopunk hacker ethos, which ultimately led to the current work with Tendermint.

Jae has been working on a project he created in 2014, called Tendermint. He initially invented and refined (with Ethan Buchman and Zarko Milosevic) the Tendermint consensus algorithm and implementation with the aim of liberating the blockchain from the costs and drawbacks of proof-of-work mining. His mission is to make this technology more accessible, in order to accelerate the adoption of decentralized ledger technology.

• Interchain Foundation President
• Ignite CEO & Founder