Mike Hearn
Founder at Hydraulic Software
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Hearn is a founder and veteran software engineer with 21 years of experience building developer tools and distributed systems from Google SRE and anti-abuse infrastructure to pioneering work on Bitcoin and enterprise blockchains. He led platform engineering at R3, architecting Corda into a leading enterprise blockchain and hiring its initial dev team, and now runs Hydraulic, focused on developer tooling. An early Bitcoin adopter and contributor, he co-created the first mobile Bitcoin wallet and contributed substantial fixes and optimizations to bitcoinj, demonstrating deep practical crypto and wallet expertise. His open-source footprint spans high-profile projects—Graal, Quasar, GNOME and more—where he brings a pragmatic focus on reliability, performance and cross-classloader concurrency. Based in Zurich, he combines hands-on backend engineering with product-level vision, and has a track record of turning research-scale ideas into deployed, production-grade systems.
21 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Durham University
Github Skills (33)
kotlin10
jvm10
graalvm10
fibers10
testing10
distributed-ledger-technology10
contract10
bitcoin10
data-serialization10
ledger10
bitcoins10
java10
serialization10
dlt10
javas10
Programming languages (28)
Github contributions (5)
bitcoinj/bitcoinj
Feb 2013 - Oct 2015
A library for working with Bitcoin
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:714 commits, 53 PRs, 129 pushes in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily focused on fixing bugs and refactoring code within the bitcoinj library, particularly in the core and wallet modules. Their contributions included fixing issues related to header synchronization, Java 7 compatibility, and code clarity. Additionally, the user implemented performance optimizations and added functionality, like implementing the getutxo message, to improve the library's overall functionality.
bip143bitcoinjbip141bip32bip173
corda/corda
Nov 2015 - Apr 2018
Corda is an open source blockchain project, designed for business from the start. Only Corda allows you to build interoperable blockchain networks that transact in strict privacy. Corda's smart contract technology allows businesses to transact directly, with value.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:89 commits, 471 PRs, 601 pushes in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Mike's commits primarily focused on the development and testing of the Corda cash contract. This included implementing basic tests for spend crafting, ensuring that various aspects of the contract behaved as expected. They also worked on multi-issuer support and deposit referencing, adding core functionality to the cash contract. Further contributions include improvements to testing utilities and adjustments to the contract code based on feedback.
interoperabledltsmart-contractprivacytransact
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.