Stefan Thomas
Stefan Thomas
Co-Creator of the Interledger Protocol
Stefan Thomas is the Co-Creator of the Interledger Protocol and Chairperson of the Board at the Interledger Foundation. He currently works on Dassie, an open-source, peer-to-peer implementation of Interledger. He is also the Founder and CEO of Coil, a startup which created a "subscription to the whole Web" and the Open Web Monetization standard. Over the course of almost five years, Coil made about 78 billion payments over Interledger, providing the first proof- of-concept for the technology at scale. Stefan was a prominent figure in the blockchain movement. As an early Bitcoin contributor, he produced the popular “What is Bitcoin?” video, introducing millions of users to Bitcoin, and created BitcoinJS, the first implementation of Bitcoin cryptography in the browser. As CTO and one of the first employees at Ripple, Stefan designed new protocols for cross-border payments, now used by banks all over the world. As part of this work, he led the team that created Interledger, an open, Internet-like protocol for value transfer. Stefan is a passionate supporter of financial access and worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop Mojaloop, an open-source national payment switch that connects mobile wallets in developing markets.
Launching Dassie: An Interledger Peer-to-peer Network
Over the last year, Stefan has been working on a new, fully peer-to-peer implementation of Interledger. The Interledger Protocol (ILP) was originally designed for network with explicit peering relationships such as contractual agreements between companies. However, Dassie is intended as an open network which is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. In his talk, Stefan will explain thes…