Christian has been a Bitcoin enthusiast since the very first hour, back in 2009. In 2012 he became a PhD candidate in the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich. The goal of his research was to improve the understanding of Bitcoin’s 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. He is now a Software Engineer and Researcher at Blockstream, where he continues his work on the specification and implementation of Lightning as well as researching other scalability solutions.