Alex Akselrod
Staff Lightning Network Engineer at Lightspark
Oceanside, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarAlex Akselrod is a Staff Lightning Network Engineer with 12 years of experience building high-performance Bitcoin and Lightning infrastructure, currently at Lightspark in Oceanside, CA. He combines deep backend systems expertise in Go (and Rust) with a strong security background from earlier roles in network and incident-focused teams. A prolific open-source contributor, Alex has made substantive low-level improvements to flagship projects like btcd, lnd, neutrino, btcwallet and btcutil—work that includes protocol-level fixes, database/index refactors, and GCS filter implementation. He has also held leadership and CTO responsibilities in startups, and co-authored Bitcoin Improvement Proposals while consulting for Lightning Labs, showing both technical depth and ecosystem influence. Notably, his contributions often touch subtle correctness and performance issues (e.g., signature encoding, mempool/RPC behavior, and chronological tx indexing) that materially improve node reliability and privacy.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
English, Russian
Github Skills (19)
back-end-development10
lightning-network10
bitcoin-wallet10
testing10
bitcoin10
distributed-systems10
bitcoins10
cryptocurrency10
go10
database-design10
cryptography10
blockchain10
concurrency10
data-structure9
leveldb9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
lightninglabs/neutrino
May 2017 - Jul 2018
Privacy-Preserving Bitcoin Light Client
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:73 commits, 30 PRs, 32 pushes in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the core implementation of the `neutrino` light client, focusing on the block manager component. Their initial work involved setting up the basic structure and functionality for managing blocks. They also made changes to the testing and rescan functionality to address issues. Furthermore, the user made several improvements to sync and filter header handling.
lightprivacylight-clientcryptocurrencydistributed-systems
btcsuite/btcwallet
Feb 2017 - Mar 2018
A secure bitcoin wallet daemon written in Go (golang)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 70 commits, 1 PR in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the `btcwallet` repository by addressing bugs and implementing new features related to the Bitcoin wallet daemon. Their work included fixing a mutex issue, potential synchronization fixes within the SPV service, and adding a bitcoind back-end for API use. The user also worked on wallet-related issues, such as correctly setting wallet birthday during rescans, and fixing UTXO-related functionalities.
golangsecuredaemonwalletbitcoin
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