Steven Roose is a blockchain-focused engineer and entrepreneur with 13 years of experience, currently co-founder and CEO of Second in Lisbon. He spent five years as a core engineer at Blockstream and is a prolific open-source contributor to flagship projects like Bitcoin Core, btcd, rust-bitcoin, and go-ethereum, often improving testing, serialization, and crypto primitives. His work spans low-level protocol changes (confidential assets and PSBT handling in Elements), Rust crypto bindings, and Bitcoin node behavior, showing both deep protocol knowledge and pragmatic infrastructure skills. Steven combines hands-on C++, Go, and Rust development with QA/test automation expertise, and he routinely publishes code and tooling so others can reuse and inspect it. Colleagues describe him as a cypherpunk-minded engineer who prefers auditable, well-documented solutions—a trait reflected in his frequent documentation and CI improvements.
13 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng, Computer Science, Master of Engineering - MEng, Computer Science at KU Leuven
Rust RPC client library for the Bitcoin Core JSON-RPC API.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:61 reviews, 327 commits, 199 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Steven primarily focused on implementing new commands and modifying existing ones for the Bitcoin Core JSON-RPC API client library. They introduced the `gettxout` command, made modifications to the `signrawtransaction` function, and incorporated additional commands for retrieving blockchain information. The user also updated dependencies and made improvements to the structure of the library.
Open Source implementation of advanced blockchain features extending the Bitcoin protocol
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:12 releases, 21 reviews, 464 commits in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Steven contributed to the implementation of core features within the Elements project, focusing on adding support for confidential assets. They introduced new data structures such as `CAsset`, `CAmountMap`, and `CConfidentialCommitment` to represent asset-related information. Furthermore, the user modified and implemented various RPC methods for processing and validating assets, including `getnewaddress`, `createrawtransaction` and `claimpegin`. Their work included extensive changes related to P2P messaging and the handling of PSBTs, especially concerning the correct serialization and de-serialization of transactions with confidential assets, and adding testing infrastructure for the same.
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.