In 2014, engineer Pieter Wuille abandoned his post at Google to join the Bitcoin development company Blockstream as a co-founder and core engineer. The developer is now moving on to Chaincode Labs, a research and development group focused on Bitcoin and related technologies. His exact job title is currently unknown. 

Wuille announced this shift in position on September 1st, writing on Twitter:

Very excited to announce I'm joining Chaincode Labs today, where I plan to keep working on protocol improvements to Bitcoin!

He added that he is "very thankful" for the time he spent with "the people at Blockstream." Wuille intends to continue "collaborating with the research team there" on improvements to the Bitcoin network. 

Wuille's announcement has been received well by many Bitcoiners, with many expressing their excitement for what the developer will be building next. 

Wuille's Accomplishments in Bitcoin Development

Wuille's prominence in the Bitcoin space goes beyond his position as the co-founder of Blockstream. Making his first commit to the Bitcoin Core Github in 2011, he has spearheaded a number of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). 

He is the developer behind BIP141, which brought Segregated Witness (SegWit) to the network. Segregated Witness is a technical change that changes how BTC transactions are stored in blocks, allowing for more transactions to be included in each block, thereby reducing transaction fees. SegWit also solves the transaction malleability problem, making second-layer scaling solutions such as the Lightning Network possible. 

More recently, Wuille has been working on Schnorr signatures and Miniscript. Schnorr signatures will allow for more private on-chain Bitcoin transactions. Miniscript is a smart contract programming language that will allow developers to more easily deploy scripts on the Bitcoin network. As Wuille and Andrew Polestra wrote in a blog post about the matter:

"Using Bitcoin Script today for building sophisticated spending conditions is far harder than it needs to be, requiring special-purpose software to be developed, tested, and deployed for each new use case. Miniscript can cover these cases in a way that generalizes across arbitrary sets of spending conditions, and is frequently much simpler and more reliable than a special-purpose solution would be."

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