Joining MIT DCI to lead our Bitcoin Software and Security Effort

We’re excited to share that AJ Towns is joining the Digital Currency Initiative to lead our Bitcoin Software and Security Effort (please find his announcement below). This four-year research and development program is designed to continue to harden the Bitcoin network and steward the industry’s commitment to funding open source software. The effort will include contributing to Bitcoin Core development as well as longer-term research, such as investigations into the stability of rewards and software to provide strong robustness and correctness guarantees. It will also include attracting talent in network and operating system security, compilers, programming languages, testing, and more to join the effort.

I can’t imagine a better person than AJ to steward this effort — he has been a contributor to Bitcoin Core since 2016 and is deeply familiar with many parts of the Bitcoin software stack, including the peer-to-peer network, consensus and validation, and layer 2.

AJ shares more about this in his post here.

Founding contributors to the DCI Bitcoin Software and Security program include Baillie Gifford, Alex Morcos (MIT ’98) and Suhas Daftuar (Chaincode), Coinshares International, Meltem Demirors (MIT Sloan ‘15), Digital Currency Group (DCG), Jack Dorsey, Fidelity, Galaxy Digital (Michael Novogratz), Gemini, Reid Hoffman, MicoStrategy (Michael Saylor, MIT ‘87), Paxos, and John Pfeffer.