Andrew Poelstra
Mathematician
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Poelstra is a mathematician and cryptography-focused engineer with 15 years of experience driving core Bitcoin and blockchain infrastructure work from Austin, Texas. As Director of Research at Blockstream, he blends deep theoretical knowledge with hands-on systems engineering, contributing significantly to widely used projects like rust-bitcoin, rust-miniscript, and libsecp256k1. His contributions range from implementing Taproot and advanced sighash functionality to improving Miniscript compiler performance and safe amount arithmetic, demonstrating both protocol-level insight and practical API design. He has a strong track record in secure, low-level C and Rust development—fixing memory leaks, adding constant-time primitives, and expanding serialization and testing coverage. Not obvious at first glance, he often bridges research and production by merging upstream Bitcoin Core changes into experimental Elements software and by surfacing subtle side-channel considerations in signing APIs. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Simon Fraser University and combines formal rigor with a pragmatic focus on reliable, auditable cryptographic implementations.
15 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Mathematics at Simon Fraser University
Stackoverflow
101reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (34)
tapi10
json-rpc10
min10
serializable10
c-language10
serializer10
back-end-development10
testing10
elliptic-curve10
bitcoin10
bitcoins10
c1110
serialization10
ecdsa10
c1710
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
rust-bitcoin/rust-secp256k1
Aug 2014 - Jan 2023
Rust language bindings for Bitcoin secp256k1 library.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:488 reviews, 498 commits, 477 PRs in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Andrew focused on refactoring and improving the core functionality of the secp256k1 library by moving around code, removing deprecation warnings, and adding new features. Their work involved updating the API for various types and methods, including signatures and keypairs. The user also implemented a custom debug output for secrets and added support for serialization and deserialization using the `serde` crate.
base58cryptographyrustsecp256k1bitcoin
BlockstreamResearch/secp256k1-zkp
Apr 2016 - Aug 2022
A fork of libsecp256k1 with support for advanced and experimental features such as Confidential Assets and MuSig2
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Cryptography Engineer
Back-end Developer & Cryptography EngineerContributions:166 reviews, 185 commits, 103 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily contributed to the rangeproof module, addressing a memory leak in unit tests. They exposed a sidechannel message field within the signing API and added API tests, demonstrating a focus on testing and security. Further improvements involved utilizing a quadratic residue for tie-breaking and cleaning up modularity.
cryptographylibsecp256k1rangeproofsbitcoin
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.