Johan Halseth
Head Of Layer-2 Research And Development at X-Receipts
Norway
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohan Halseth is Head of Layer-2 Research and Development at NYDIG with 11 years of experience building Bitcoin and Lightning infrastructure. He combines deep protocol-level expertise with hands-on engineering, contributing significant features and tests to flagship open-source projects like lnd and btcd. Johan has led native mobile integrations for Lightning (iOS bridges between React Native and LND) and improved core components across neutrino, btcwallet and taproot-assets, demonstrating fluency in Go, protobuf/gRPC and native mobile stacks. His background includes leadership as CTO at Firi and engineering roles at Lightning Labs and Google, bridging research, product and production services. Known for careful attention to edge cases and security in channel/HTLC and transaction handling, he focuses on robust, well-tested implementations of complex cryptographic protocols. Based in Norway, he pairs a master’s in algorithms with unusual breadth across low-level Bitcoin primitives and consumer-facing wallet UX.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Visiting Student Researcher Computer Science, Visiting Student Researcher Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyMaster's Degree Algorithms, Master's Degree Algorithms at University of Bergen (UiB)Norwegian University of Science and Technology
English, Norwegian
Stackoverflow
33reputation
2kreached
0answers
3questions
Github Skills (43)
tar10
objective-c10
transaction10
transactional10
ios10
react-native10
lightning-network10
testing10
tarfile10
bitcoin10
distributed-systems10
bitcoins10
segwit10
targz10
go10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
lightningnetwork/lnd
May 2017 - Nov 2021
Lightning Network Daemon ⚡️
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 564 reviews, 1602 commits in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Johan's contributions primarily involve the development of new features and improvements to the Lightning Network Daemon (LND) codebase. The commits demonstrate expertise in core components, including channel management, commitment transaction construction, and HTLC handling. The user implemented tests to ensure proper functioning, and the changes show an understanding of the underlying protocol and its potential vulnerabilities, indicating a focus on back-end development within the Lightning Network.
cryptographypaymentsprotocoldaemonlightning
lightninglabs/neutrino
Jun 2017 - May 2021
Privacy-Preserving Bitcoin Light Client
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 149 commits, 61 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Johan's contributions primarily focused on improving the robustness and error handling of the `BlockHeaderStore` and other core components. They addressed issues related to chain tip retrieval and transaction handling, specifically within the context of the neutrino light client. Their work included changes to the query logic to ensure blocks are fetched from the cache before peers are queried. Additionally, they added and improved the test suite, adding a block cache test.
lightprivacylight-clientcryptocurrencydistributed-systems
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