MIT

Main links

• Back in 2014 many students at MIT were interested in Bitcoin and were creating faucets and running miners.
• include active developments from professors at MIT (Algorand, Enigma (almost the whole team comes from MIT), & Zerocoin
• Some researchers that work on Unit-e come from this university
• Is on the advisory list of Ampleforth (as of 9-2019)
• Peter Todd; professor
• One of the founding members (6-6-2019) of the Algorand Foundation’s university program.

MIT’s Media Lab

• Finances the work of Bitcoin Core maintainer Wladimir van der Laan, Cory Fields and Gavin Andresen (MIT DCS)
• “While it is not known that the MIT has not been neutral regarding Bitcoin development, the institute was strongly criticized in the cryptocurrency community for its ChainAnchor project, which tries to connect identities with Blockchain addresses and to make Blockchains permissioned.”
• John Henry Clippinger; a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group where he is conducting research on trust frameworks for protecting and sharing personal information. He is the author of “From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Identity and Autonomy in a Digital Society,” and “A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity.”
• Joyce Kim, co-founder & board member of Stellar, is also a Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab

MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative

• Michael J. Casey: "is the chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative."
• James Lovejoy; a researcher

Other main people

• Neha Narula, Director, MIT DCS (who also led an MIT team that demonstrated significant vulnerabilities in Hash function Curl by IOTA.)
• Forde, Brian; Former director of the Digital Currency Initiative of MIT, Advisory Board at Bitfury, former White House advisor and now MIT lecturer
• Silvio Micali; professor and founder of Algorand
• Noah Jessop

Former graduates

• Nick Pudar, now advisor for MOBI
• Former PHD's who created Celer come from here
• Marcin; "graduated with a bachelor’s degree from MIT in computer science with a minor in mathematics. Marcin is very active in the Bitcoin space, having served as President of the MIT Bitcoin Club, interned at Chaincode Labs, and worked as a researcher at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative." Now working for Sia
• Rhett Creighton; "Rhett holds a bachelors degree in Physics and masters degree in Nuclear Engineering, both from MIT. "
• Alessandro Chiesa; He received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2014, and B.S. degrees in computer science and mathematics from MIT in 2009. (advisor to Algorand).

• Sam Bankman-Fried; graduated from MIT with a degree in physics and now CEO of FTX.
• Gary Wang; graduated from MIT with a degree in Mathematics with Computer Science and now CTO of FTX.
• Tyler Spalding; holds two master degrees from MIT and is now the CEO of Flexacoin.

Other links

• Has MIT Bitcoin Club, sponsored by The Blockchain Education Network
• bitcoind, a program that implements the Bitcoin protocol for remote procedure call (RPC) use. It is also the second Bitcoin client in the network's history. It is available under the MIT license
• Jamesl22; James is the lead developer of Vertcoin and has been programming in one form or another since age 10. He currently is an undergraduate researcher at the MIT DCI, working on enacting decentralized monetary policy.
• Sohn, Young; Advisory Board at BitFury, the president and chief strategy officer at Samsung Electronics, received his MBA from MIT.
• Livingston, Dennis; CFO at Argon Group, Finance executive with 15 years of CFO and Corporate Controller experience Ernst & Young, MIT
• Liu, Mitch; CEO / co-founder of Theta Token. Has been co-founder of three different companies before, one was Sliver.tv. BS in Computer Science & Engineering from MIT, MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Zaterman, Danny; MIT and advisor for Zap
• Meltem Demirors; helped create the MIT “Future of Commerce” online course
• Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, partnered with MIT to publish a public dataset of bitcoin transactions associated with illicit activity; the group’s study categorized 203,769 bitcoin node transactions worth roughly $6B in total and explored whether artificial intelligence could assist current anti-money laundering (AML) procedures; after examining the nodes’ association with known entities, researchers found only 2 percent of those 200K bitcoin transactions were deemed illicit