Christian is an early adopter of Bitcoin, having joined the network in 2009. In 2012 his hobby became his job, by writing the world's first dissertation on Bitcoin and Blockchain. His focus is on making Bitcoin scalable, and his research resulted in numerous publications, including the introduction of Duplex Micropayment Channels. After his PhD he joined Blockstream where to this date he's working on the Lightning Network specification, as well as the c-lightning implementation.