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The future of finance, built on bitcoin.
We make sure that future belongs to you.
Blockstream provides full-stack, bitcoin-native solutions that empower individuals, developers, and enterprises to hold their own keys, build on open infrastructure, and run their financial lives on bitcoin.
Blockstream engineers (including Pieter Wuille, Matt Corallo, and Andrew Chow) served as long-time Bitcoin Core maintainers and leading contributors across consensus, wallet architecture, and P2P networking.
Blockstream engineers have been major contributors to and maintainers of the high-performance secp256k1 library used by Bitcoin Core for signatures, as well as maintaining libsecp256k1-zkp for Liquid. The library itself predates Blockstream.
Rusty Russell built the first Lightning implementation at Blockstream, later Core Lightning, and chaired the BOLTs process that produced the interoperable Lightning specification.
Blockstream co-founder Mark Friedenbach invented the use of sequence numbers for relative locktime and wrote the reference implementation of OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY, standardized in BIP 112 and activated on bitcoin in 2016.
Pieter Wuille and Greg Maxwell authored BIP 173, introducing the Bech32 address format used for native SegWit; Pieter later designed Bech32m (BIP 350) for Taproot and future witness versions.
Blockstream researchers extended Confidential Transactions to hide not only amounts but also asset types, enabling confidential multi-asset transactions on Elements and Liquid.
Andrew Poelstra pioneered Scriptless Scripts and introduced the Schnorr/adaptor-signature construction underlying Point Time Locked Contracts for Lightning.
Blockstream researchers co-developed MuSig, introducing secure Schnorr multi-signatures (multisig) with key aggregation so that an n-of-n multisig can appear on-chain as a single public key and signature.
Blockstream researchers played a central role in designing and specifying bitcoin’s Schnorr signature scheme and Taproot, co-authoring BIP 340 and BIPs 341/342. They activated on bitcoin in 2021.
Andrew Poelstra developed the CAT-and-Schnorr construction, showing how OP_CAT and BIP 340 signatures can emulate CHECKSIGFROMSTACK-like functionality and enable transaction introspection and general-purpose bitcoin covenants.
Eric Sirion developed Minimint (later Fedimint) while supported by Blockstream Research, introducing federated Chaumian e-cash for bitcoin to enable community-custody mints interoperable with the Lightning Network.
Blockstream researchers co-developed ROAST, a robust asynchronous wrapper for threshold signature schemes such as FROST that allows honest signers to complete signing despite offline or malicious participants.
Liam Eagen and Ariel Gabizon published ProtoGalaxy, an efficient multi-instance folding scheme for recursive arguments and Incremental Verifiable Computation (IVC) without trusted setup or pairings, providing the cryptographic foundation for private client-side validation.
Blockstream Research developed Bulletproofs++, a substantially smaller and faster successor to Bulletproofs and Bulletproofs+ for Confidential Transactions that introduced reciprocal arguments to eliminate surjection proofs. The work was published at EUROCRYPT 2024.
Blockstream Research, together with Alpen Labs and ZeroSync, introduced Shielded CSV, combining client-side validation with cryptographic techniques to hide transaction histories while retaining compact on-chain commitments.
Andrew Poelstra co-developed ColliderScript, demonstrating that bitcoin covenants are theoretically possible today without a consensus change, albeit at completely impractical computational cost.
Formal verification of libsecp256k1 modular inversion (safegcd)
Russell O’Connor developed machine-checked proofs in Coq verifying the correctness and constant-time execution of the Bernstein–Yang modular inverse algorithm in libsecp256k1.
Russell O’Connor, Christian Lewe, and Sanket Kanjalkar developed the first version of Simfony (later renamed SimplicityHL), a high-level, strongly typed smart-contract language and web IDE that compiles to Simplicity, bridging low-level Simplicity combinators to accessible covenant development.
Blockstream Research and Yannick Seurin developed DahLIAS, the first full cross-input signature aggregation scheme for bitcoin’s native secp256k1 curve, producing constant-size aggregate signatures. The work was accepted at EUROCRYPT 2026.
Tim Ruffing proved that bitcoin’s Taproot tweaking construction is computationally binding and hiding against quantum adversaries under standard hash assumptions, establishing that Taproot script trees created today can safely host post-quantum spending and recovery paths.
Blockstream Research released secp256k1lab, a Python implementation of the secp256k1 curve and related cryptographic schemes designed for rapid prototyping, experimentation, and education.
Blockstream Research published an open-source workbook and training curriculum to train Bitcoin Core and ecosystem developers in reduction-based security proofs and provable cryptography.
Blockstream Research designed SHRINCS, a compact hash-based post-quantum signature scheme optimized for bitcoin and Liquid. We broadcast what we believe were the first transactions on a production bitcoin sidechain authorized using post-quantum signatures (verifying SHRINCS via Simplicity on Liquid mainnet) and authored a draft BIP proposal for OP_CHECKSHRINCS on bitcoin.