Christopher Allen
Principal Architect, Blockstream

Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen is an entrepreneur, technologist, and educator who specializes in collaboration, security, and trust. As a pioneer in internet cryptography, he’s initiated cross-industry collaborations and created industry standards that influence the entire internet. Though he’s worked within numerous privacy and security sectors, Christopher’s recent emphasis has been on engines of trust such as blockchain, smart contracts, and smart signatures, in particular decentralized self-sovereign identity.

Christopher’s focus on internet trust began as the founder of Consensus Development. There, he worked with Netscape to develop SSL and co-authored the IETF TLS internet draft that is now at the heart of all secure commerce on the World Wide Web. More recently he facilitated a design workshop on Rebooting the Web of Trust, which generated several white papers about the next generation of internet privacy, security, and identity software, and is part of a team leading a UN summit on Digital Identity. He is currently Principal Architect at Blockstream, leading blockchain standards efforts.

Christopher has also been a digital civil liberties and human-rights privacy advisor, startup consultant, a social web strategy consultant, the producer of a half-dozen iPhone and iPad games, the co-founder & moderator of the iOSDevCamp Hackathon, and the producer of Infinite PDF, a non-linear media app. Christopher teaches cryptocurrency classes at Blockchain University, has taught Technology Leadership classes in the sustainable MBA program at Pinchot University, and was part of the faculty team that designed a totally integrated first-year sustainable business curriculum.

Since 2003 Christopher has been sharing his experience at his blog www.LifeWithAlacrity.com, where he discusses a variety of topics including entrepreneurship, the social web, internet security, and collaboration.

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