Side Labs, the company behind Side Protocol, announced the appointment of Dave Hrycyszyn as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO), who will lead the development of the Bitcoin extension layer. As the new CTO, Dave will be responsible for the company's technical strategy and lead the architecture and development work to promote Side to improve the programmability of Bitcoin and achieve widespread adoption.
Dave Hrycyszyn has extensive expertise in distributed systems, blockchain scalability, computer security, and agile development. He is the co-author of the blockchain sharding protocol Chainspace and the leaderless PBFT variant consensus protocol Blockmania. Before joining Side Labs, Chainspace, co-founded by Dave, was acquired by Facebook and became the core team of Libra. Other core members who left Chainspace founded Celestia and Sui respectively. Dave then served as the CTO of Nym, a privacy DePIN project led by a16z.
In addition to his roles in Chainspace and Nym, Dave was also a co-founder and consultant of Vega Protocol.
Last year, Side Protocol completed a $1.5 million Pre-Seed round of financing, with Hashkey Capital, KR1, Continue Capital, Symbolic Capital and other institutions and individuals participating. Recent reports indicate that Side Labs has shifted its focus to developing Bitcoin's expansion layer. (Cointelegraph)