Blockstream

Blockstream
Corporation
Industry Cryptocurrency software
Founded 2014
Founders
Headquarters San Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
  • Adam Back (President)
Number of employees
 10–50[1] (2014)
Website blockstream.com

Blockstream is a blockchain technology company co-founded by Adam Back, Gregory Maxwell, Pieter Wuille and others, and led by Adam Back. Blockstream is one of a number of institutions that provide funding for the development of Bitcoin Core, the predominant network client software.

Company

The company is focused on developing bitcoin applications: specifically sidechains, as well as other applications.[2][3] Blockstream has raised $76M to date from investors including Horizons Ventures and Mosaic Ventures.[4] [5][6] Blockstream employs several prominent bitcoin developers, including Adam Back (President, Blockstream), Mark Friedenbach (Co-founder, Blockstream), Pieter Wuille (Bitcoin Core developer), Samson Mow (CSO), and Christopher Allen (co-author of IETF Transport Layer Security).[7][8][9] Blockstream is one of the largest contributors of funding for Bitcoin Core.[8]

Products

Liquid sidechain

On October 12, 2015, Blockstream announced the release of its Liquid sidechain which could allow for the transfer of assets between the sidechain and the main blockchain.[10][11][12] Blockstream produces software that facilitates interoperability between the main chain and the sidechain.[13] Blockstream claims that Liquid reduces the delays and friction involved in a normal transfer of bitcoin. Blockstream asserts participating exchanges–Bitfinex, BTCC, Kraken, Unocoin and Xapo can make near instant exchanges between their accounts and orderbooks.[14][9] The company has proposed that the Liquid sidechain, which is a pegged sidechain, be added to the bitcoin protocol.[15][16][17] The source code for sidechains has been released on an open source basis.[18]

Blockstream Satellite

In 2017 Blockstream announced a plan to offer one way satellite broadcasting of the full bitcoin blockchain.[19] The network as of 2017 is only a one way network and the user still needs an internet connection to send transaction.[19] The company plans to earn fees for value added services on the network, such as creating an API to allow companies to send additional data over its network.[19]

Initiatives

In addition to its corporate initiatives, Blockstream is also involved in a number of community steering and open source programs.

Bitcoin

Blockstream is one of the largest contributors of funding for Bitcoin Core.[8]

Lightning Network

Blockstream hired Rusty Russell, a developer well-known for his work on the Linux kernel, to develop an implementation of the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN). Russell has a four-part LN explanation on his blog.[9] The Lightning network proposes to reduce transaction costs by allowing nodes to hold some transaction data in the cache before submitting it to the chain.[20]

In May 2016, Blockchain.info announced Thunder, which claims to be an implementation of Lightning.[21]

In May 2017, Segregated Witness activated on Litecoin, enabling the Lightning Network to be used.[22] In May 2017 Christian Decker of Blockstream sent the first microtransaction using Lightning on Litecoin.[23]

Elements Project

Blockstream released an open source codebase and testing environment for its sidechains product to the public under an open source license.[24] The Elements Project is a community effort to create and test new extensions to the Bitcoin protocol, whose early contributions include Confidential Transactions by Gregory Maxwell, and Segregated Witness by Pieter Wuille.[25]

Confidential Assets

In April 2017, Blockstream released a paper on Confidential Assets,[26] an extension of Confidential Transactions (which is itself derived from an Adam Back proposal for homomorphic values applied to Bitcoin[27]).

Among other contributions:

We begin by describing an efficient rangeproof for Pedersen commitments over the interval [0, mn − 1], which has total size proportional to 1 + nm, using a variant of a folklore bit-decomposition based rangeproof, in which numbers are expressed in base m and each digit is proven to lie in [0, m − 1] using a ring signature.

The rangeproofs are implemented in ElementsProject/secp256k1-zkp.

References

  1. ↑ "Crunchbase: Blockstream Company Profile". Crunchbase. Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  2. ↑ Evans, Jon (31 October 2015). "Liquid Bitcoin". TechCrunch. AOL.
  3. ↑ Das, Samburaj (14 October 2015). "The First SideChain for Bitcoin Exchanges". CryptoCoinsNews. Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  4. ↑ "Our Investment in Blockstream". Mosaic Ventures. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
  5. ↑ "Bitcoin startup blockstream raises 55 million in funding round". Wall Street Journal. 4 February 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  6. ↑ Rizzo, Pete (18 November 2014). "Blockstream: $21 Million Funding Will Drive Bitcoin Development". CoinDesk.
  7. ↑ Torpey, Kyle (12 April 2017). "Samson Mow Plans to "Make Bitcoin Great Again" as Blockstream's New Chief Strategy Officer". Nasdaq.com.
  8. 1 2 3 Rizzo, Pete (5 April 2016). "Blockstream Adds Another Marquee Developer in Security Pioneer Christopher Allen". CoinDesk.
  9. 1 2 3 "Blockstream". WeUseCoins. Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  10. ↑ Casey, Michael J. "BitBeat: Blockstream Unveils Much-Awaited First Sidechain Prototype". WSJ (Blog).
  11. ↑ Vigna, Paul. "BitBeat: Blockstream Releases Liquid, First 'Sidechain'". WSJ (Blog). Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  12. ↑ Chishti, Susanne; Barberis, Janos (February 29, 2016). "Application Stacks". The FINTECH Book: The Financial Technology Handbook for Investors ... Wiley Publishing. p. 219. ISBN 978-1-119-21887-6.
  13. ↑ Swan, Melanie (January 1, 2015). Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1-4919-2049-7.
  14. ↑ "Blockstream to Launch First Sidechain for Bitcoin Exchanges". CoinDesk.
  15. ↑ Allison, Ian. "Blockstream announces Liquid movement of Bitcoin quickly and securely between exchanges". International Business Times UK. Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  16. ↑ Evans, Jon. "Liquid Bitcoin". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  17. ↑ "Blockstream Jumps Into Liquid – PYMNTS.com". PYMNTS.com. Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  18. ↑ "Blockstream to Release First Open Source Code for Sidechains". CoinDesk.
  19. 1 2 3 "Blockstream Is Using Satellites to Beam Bitcoin Down to Earth". CoinDesk. 15 August 2017. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
  20. ↑ Poon, Joseph; Dryja, Thaddeus (14 January 2016). "The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments DRAFT Version 0.5.9.2" (PDF). Retrieved 10 April 2016.
  21. ↑ "Announcing the Thunder Network Alpha Release". Blockchain Blog.
  22. ↑ Blockstream [@Blockstream] (10 May 2017). "Blockstream's Christian Decker @Snyke completes first Lightning network payment on Litecoin. See. Blog post soon!" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  23. ↑ Suberg, William (12 May 2017). "Blockstream Sends First Litecoin Lightning Microtransaction". Retrieved 26 August 2017.
  24. ↑ Higgins, Stan (9 June 2016). "Blockstream to Release First Open Source Code for Sidechains". CoinDesk.
  25. ↑ Dale, Martin (12 April 2016). "Announcing the New Elements Project". Elements Project (Blog).
  26. ↑ Andrew Poelstra, Adam Back, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, and Pieter Wuille. "Confidential Assets" (PDF). Blockstream.com. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  27. ↑ "ignopeverell/grin". GitHub. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
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