Today we are talking to David, the Co-Founder of Stellar. And we discuss the founding story of the Stellar Cryptocurrency. We dive deep into the benefits and inner workings of blockchain technology, and what the world will look like as more innovation is brought into currencies.

All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!

Check them out now at Stellar.org!

About David:

David Mazières is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he leads the Secure Computer Systems research group and co-directs the Center for Blockchain Research and Future of Digital Currency Initiative. His research interests include Operating Systems and Distributed Systems, with a particular focus on security. He is also a co-founder of the Stellar Development Foundation.

Some of the projects Prof. Mazières has collaborated on include SFS (a self-certifying network file system), SUNDR (a file system that introduced the notion of fork linearizability), Kademlia (a widely used peer-to-peer routing algorithm), Coral (a peer-to-peer content distribution network), HiStar (a secure operating system based on decentralized information flow control), tcpcrypt (a TCP option providing forward-secure encryption), Hails (a web framework that can preserve privacy while incorporating untrusted third-party apps), Dune (a driver granting linux processes safe access to privileged CPU features), and the Stellar blockchain (for which he developed the Stellar consensus protocol, SCP). Prof. Mazières received a BS in Computer Science from Harvard in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000. His awards include an Oakland distinguished paper award (2015), Sloan award (2002), USENIX best paper award (2001), NSF CAREER award (2001), and MIT Sprowls best thesis in computer science award (2000).

About Stellar:

Stellar’s mission is open source financial access for all. The Stellar Development Foundation is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. We’re building a common financial platform, designed to be open and accessible to everyone. Just as the internet allowed anyone to send an email or create a blog, Stellar now allows people to easily send, save, and receive money, without large fees or hassle.