Christian Decker is the Lead Engineer at Blockstream. Christian is a Bitcoin enthusiast from the very beginning, back in 2009. He got involved in the, then small, community and starting to contribute. In 2012 he was offered a PhD Candidate position in the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich. The goal of his research is to improve the understanding of the underlying consensus mechanisms and to enable the network to scale with the increasing demands. The result was the world’s first PhD dissertation about Bitcoin and the creation of a number of protocols including PeerCensus and Duplex Micropayment Channels.