Andreas M. Antonopoulos is an acclaimed author, speaker, educator, and one of the world’s foremost bitcoin and open blockchain experts. Andreas makes complex subjects accessible and easy to understand. He is known for delivering electric talks that combine economics, psychology, technology, and game theory with current events, personal anecdote, and historical precedent—effortlessly transliterating the complex issues of blockchain technology out of the abstract and into the real world.

In 2014, Antonopoulos authored the groundbreaking book, Mastering Bitcoin, widely considered to be the best technical guide ever written about the technology. His second book, The Internet of Money, unveiled the “why” of bitcoin—and became a bestseller on Amazon as did the follow up books The Internet of Money Volume Two, and The Internet of Money Volume Three. Mastering Ethereum, a technical guide to the Ethereum network, was published in late 2018. His most recent book Mastering the Lightning Network explains Bitcoin's second layer payment network. His books have been translated and published in 14 languages so far.

He is a teaching fellow with the University of Nicosia, serves on the Oversight Committee for the Bitcoin Reference Rate at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and has appeared as an expert witness in hearings around the world, including the Australian Senate Banking Committee and the Canadian Senate Commerce, Banking and Finance Committee.

As an entrepreneur, Andreas has founded a number of bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. He serves as an advisor to several bitcoin and crypto-currency companies. He is a widely published author of articles and blog posts on bitcoin, is a permanent host on the popular Speaking of Bitcoin Podcast, and a frequent speaker at technology and security conferences and meetups worldwide.

Andreas can be contacted via twitter (@aantonop) or via the contact forms on his website aantonop.com

Rene Pickhardt is researching the reliability of the payment process on the Lightning Network. Together with his co-authors he created an imbalance measure for Lightning nodes, proposed Just in Time Routing (JIT Routing), introduced Probabilistic payment delivery and found the optimal split of multi part payments that led to the currently best known payment routing algorithm ( aka Pickhardt Payments ). He also disclosed several vulnerabilities.

As an educator Rene added the first article about the Lightning Network to the German Wikipedia, created an openly licensed 300 slides presentation diving into the protocol, answered more than 50% of all questions about the Lightning Network on Stack exchange and maintained the first youtube channel explaining the Lightning Network to developers.

Rene studied Mathematics, Physics, Chinese and Computer Science and was a fellow of the German National Academic Foundation.

Olaoluwa Osuntokun is the co-founder and CTO of Lightning Labs, and also the lead developer of lnd, one of the main implementations of Lightning. He received his B.S and M.S in Computer Science from UCSB and was a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2019. During his graduate studies he focused on the field of applied cryptography, specifically encrypted search. He has been an active Bitcoin developer for over 7 years, and is an author of several Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP 157+158). These days, his primary focus lies in building, designing, and evolving private, scalable off-chain blockchain protocols, such as Lightning.