Adam Back

Co-Founder Blockstream

Adam Back

Co-Founder Blockstream

Biography

Having worked on e-cash protocols since 1995, Adam 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). Adam 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, Adam 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.