Gregory Maxwell is a renowned developer of cryptographic systems, streams and encoding in the world of free software.
GRegory Maxwell, gained wide recognition within the free software community for his contributions. Initially he worked as a developer within the Mozilla Foundation y xiph. In both foundations he was part of the free codec development group Opus. This is widely used for the voice transmission over the Internet using low-bandwidth channels. An arduous work that currently allows audio communication in real time.
Beginnings of his work in Bitcoin
In 2011, Gregory Maxwell became part of the active team of bitcoin development. During this stage, he was interested in improving various cryptographic aspects of technology. In 2014, Maxwell was part of the founding team of Blockstream, where he held the position of CTO (Technical Chief). In Blockstream he ended up becoming one of the most active reviewers of the ecosystem's cryptographic protocol proposals.
Gregory Maxwell's contributions to the blockchain ecosystem in Blockstream
Gregory Maxwell stands out for his varied and important contributions to the crypto world, including:
- The homomorphic derivation of keys used in the BIP32
This BIP , mentions the ability to create deterministic wallets. An option that allows the creation of wallets quickly and safely overcoming some technical problems presented in the original Bitcoin technology. - Confidence privacy preservation techniques
The creation of these techniques led to the development the coinjo. In order to improve the privacy capabilities of Bitcoin. - The development of sidechains (side chains)
Part of your work within Blockstream He dedicated himself to laying the foundations for the creation of sidechains. With the use of this technology, the use of sidechains was enabled to improve the scalability of blockchains such as that of Bitcoin. Technologies like Lightning Network, Liquid, Plasma y Raiden, are a consequence of their work in this regard. - The blind solvency test system
- A system confidential transactions for Bitcoin
With this system, Maxwell seeks to solve the basic problems of privacy in Bitcoin transactions. Testing of this technology is underway at the sidechains project Elements.
Post-Blockstream Gregory Maxwell developments
Later in 2018, Maxwell left Blockstream leaving his role in the hands of Andrew Poelstra and the CEO Adam Back.
I'm very excited about all the exciting new technology coming into production… Bulletproofs / CT, improved signature aggregation, propagation and synchronization - as well as the continued maturation of Bitcoin as a viable subject for the academic research world. I will spend more time helping with this and other things, and I will no longer have anything to do with Blockstream activities or a Blockstream email address (I can continue to be contacted at my xiph.org and gmail as I have used here in the past), yet this shouldn't change anything for anyone here.
Gregory Maxwell
Resignation Announcement on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list - January 19, 2018
After this, he began to focus his interest on the development of smart contracts on Bitcoin. He released the first job of his called tap root. With which it seeks to create a development ecosystem based on smart contracts for Bitcoin. To achieve this, it uses MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree). This is a proposed solution that uses the merkle trees to create a system to lock and unlock funds according to a given schedule.
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