Jeff Garzik

Jeff Garzik is the Co-Founder and Chief Designer at Vesper. Jeff is the co-founder and CEO of Bloq. 

Jeff serves on the board of Coin Center, and the advisory board of BitFury, BitPay, Chain.com, Netki, and WayPaver Labs. 

Jeff has delivered presentations on bitcoin and blockchain at TEDx, State of Digital Money, and many bitcoin conferences, as well as private briefings to corporations, governments, central banks, and hedge funds.

Jeff has a long history of early technology adoption. After helping to inaugurate CNN.com on the Internet in the early 1990s, he worked for a succession of Internet startups and service providers. At the same time, he worked continuously on open-source software engineering projects for over two decades.

His involvement in one of the best-known open-source projects, the Linux kernel, led to an extended tenure at Linux leader Red Hat during open source’s most formative years. Jeff’s work is found in every Android phone and data centre Linux installation today.

Jeff Garzik is a software developer and entrepreneur based in the United States. After his education in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, he began his career as a web developer for CNN, where he helped develop the first CNN.com website. He then worked for Red Hat as a Principal Software Engineer for over 10 years, working on Linux kernel and cloud engineering and open-source evangelism.

Garzik's interest in cryptocurrencies led him to become a Bitcoin Core developer for BitPay in 2013, where he worked for a year and eight months. In 2011, he founded exMULTI, Inc., a company focused on all things Bitcoin-related, which he led as CEO for two years and five months.

In 2012, Garzik founded Dunvegan Space Systems, Inc., a company focused on building the physical, virtual, and financial infrastructure for space exploration and settlement. The company aimed to bring decentralized, networked, open-source design principles to spaceflight and open new frontiers throughout the solar system for the betterment of humanity. He led Dunvegan Space Systems for three years and eight months before leaving in November 2015.

Garzik is currently a Co-Founder of Bloq, a company that provides enterprise-grade blockchain technology to businesses and has been with the company since October 2015. In January 2022, he started Nextcypher Productions, a self-employed venture based in Los Angeles, California.

In July 2010, Jeff stumbled across a post describing Bitcoin. Immediately recognizing the potential of a concept previously thought impossible: decentralized digital money, he did what came naturally: developed bitcoin open source software. That gave rise to the start of micro-businesses with Bitcoin at their foundation. Almost by accident, Jeff found himself at the heart of the global, revolutionary, technology phenomenon known as bitcoin.

Bitcoin and blockchain served as a springboard for many new ideas and ventures, including sending objects into outer space.