Fabrice Drouin
Founder & CTO at ACINQ
Paris, Ile-de-France
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFabrice Drouin is a founder and CTO with 14 years of experience architecting large-scale distributed systems and a track record scaling payment infrastructure at ACINQ, a leading company building the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Based in Paris, he combines deep systems design expertise with hands-on backend development—contributing to core Lightning implementations like Core Lightning and Eclair where he worked on commitment fees, revocation preimages, HTLCs and Sphinx routing internals. His background spans biometrics and signal processing engineering, and he has led R&D, product architecture and benchmarking efforts that secured major contracts in high-assurance domains. Known for translating low-level protocol details into robust, scalable production systems, he blends academic training from Télécom Paris and Imperial College with entrepreneurial leadership.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
MSc, telecommunications and signal processing, MSc, telecommunications and signal processing at Imperial College LondonIngénieur, traitement de l'image, Ingénieur, traitement de l'image at Télécom Paris
French, English, German
Github Skills (12)
transactionscope10
bitcoin10
transaction10
transaction-manager10
bitcoins10
cprogramming-language10
lightning-network10
cryptography10
blockchain10
payment-methods10
peer-to-peer9
peer-connection9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
ACINQ/eclair
Aug 2015 - Jan 2023
A scala implementation of the Lightning Network.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 releases, 380 reviews, 608 commits in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Fabrice's contributions focus on implementing and fixing functionality within the Lightning Network protocol, with a specific focus on building and managing channels. The commits demonstrate work related to commitment transactions, HTLCs (Hashed Timelock Contracts), payment request handling, and routing, all core components of a Lightning Network implementation. The code changes include low-level operations related to the protocol, indicating a strong understanding of the underlying mechanisms.
paymentslightningblockchainscalacryptocurrency
ElementsProject/lightning
May 2016 - Jul 2017
Core Lightning — Lightning Network implementation focusing on spec compliance and performance
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 4 PRs, 2 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Fabrice primarily focused on enhancing the core Lightning Network implementation. They worked on initializing commitment fee rates and integrating revocation preimages within the shachain, ensuring preimages were generated in reverse order for security. Additionally, the user made adjustments to the amount encoding within the Sphinx protocol for improved functionality and implemented changes related to revocation key derivation. Their contributions involved modifications to core files related to peer management, packets, and secrets.
core-lightningfocusinglightningspecperformance
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