The post From Bitcoin to Decred: The Story of Jake Yocom-Piatt appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Jake Yocom-Piatt co-founded Decred to solve governance issues in crypto, combining proof-of-work and proof-of-stake for decentralized decision-making. Decred continues innovating with privacy features and governance automation, moving toward a fully decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Jake Yocom-Piatt, a physics graduate from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, undoubtedly had no idea that his journey would lead him to become one of the cryptocurrency pioneers. Still, he was able to focus his attention on open-source software development given a solid background in physics. Before getting into crypto, Jake started Conformal Systems, where his team created products including Cyphertite, an encrypted online backup solution. However, competing with huge venture-backed enterprises was a significant obstacle for the endeavor. Recognizing the need for a change of direction, Jake and his team opted to focus on Bitcoin, which was then gaining popularity as an alternative to the old banking system. Creating BTCSuite: Initial Crypto Steps Early 2013 saw Jake funding and supervising the development of BTCSuite, a Go alternative full-node implementation of Bitcoin. The intention was to present a safer and more effective substitute for the Bitcoin community. Though BTCSuite did not find general acceptance among Bitcoin users, its source code is used in several other well-known initiatives, including Factom, Ethereum, and the Lightning Network. This implies that Jake’s contributions had a wider influence than he could have first projected. Founding Decred: Answering Governance Challenges Jake’s interactions in the Bitcoin community helped him to come to the opinion that the governance of the project had a basic flaw. Often decisions were taken by a small number of people without consulting the larger society. In order to solve this problem, early 2014 saw Jake and two anonymous partners start Decred, a cryptocurrency stressing decentralized governance. Decred became public in February 2016 in order to…

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Filed under: News - @ January 30, 2025 12:21 am