Christian Decker
Lead Engineer at Blockstream
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristian Decker is a Bitcoin pioneer and distributed-systems researcher with 15 years of engineering experience, currently leading core engineering at Blockstream from Zurich. He authored the world’s first PhD dissertation on Bitcoin at ETH Zurich and designed protocols such as PeerCensus and Duplex Micropayment Channels to help scale consensus and payments. A longtime open-source contributor, he has contributed to Bitcoin Core DNS seed functionality and played a central role in implementing Sphinx onion routing and multi-part payment features for Lightning Network projects. His blend of deep cryptography, networking and systems expertise is grounded in hands-on reliability work (including an SRE internship at Google) and long-term involvement in the Bitcoin community since 2009.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Distributed Computing - Bitcoin, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Distributed Computing - Bitcoin at ETH Zürich
German, English, Italian, French
Stackoverflow
4,577reputation
716kreached
32answers
71questions
locking
top-5%
Github Skills (33)
json-rpc10
c-language10
lightning-network10
sphinx10
bitcoin10
bitcoins10
c1110
networking10
c1710
cryptocurrency10
rpc10
go10
hmac10
cryptography10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
ElementsProject/lightning
Jun 2016 - Jan 2023
Core Lightning — Lightning Network implementation focusing on spec compliance and performance
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 releases, 710 reviews, 2869 commits in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Christian implemented and modified code to facilitate the payment process, including the creation of functions to handle the payment flow, the setting of channel properties, and the management of payment results. Their work involved the incorporation of new parameters and methods for managing the payment details, as well as adding features for multi-part payment systems. They were also focused on enhancements to the existing RPC calls in the code.
core-lightningfocusinglightningspecperformance
lightningnetwork/lightning-onion
Jun 2016 - Feb 2019
Onion Routed Micropayments for the Lightning Network
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 5 PRs, 11 comments in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Christian primarily contributed to the implementation and refinement of the Sphinx onion routing protocol within the Lightning Network. Their work involved fixing race conditions in shared secret storage, implementing the initial version of Sphinx based on the specification, and adding associated data to the HMAC calculations. Further, they refactored the code to better handle multi-frame payloads and introduced the `HopPayload` structure. Their contributions demonstrate a strong focus on the core cryptographic and networking aspects of the project.
cryptographyonion-architecturelightningblockchainonion
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