Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen is Founder of Blockchain Commons, Internet Cryptography Pioneer & CTO — Co-author TLS Security Standard — Blockchain Development. Christopher Allen is an entrepreneur and technologist who specializes in collaboration, security, and trust. As a pioneer in internet cryptography, he’s initiated cross-industry collaborations and created industry standards that influence the entire internet. Though he’s worked within numerous privacy and security sectors, Christopher’s recent emphasis has been on engines of trust such as blockchain, smart contracts, and smart signatures, in particular decentralized self-sovereign identity. Christopher’s focus on internet trust began as the founder of Consensus Development. There, he worked with Netscape to develop SSL and co-authored the IETF TLS internet draft that is now at the heart of all secure commerce on the World Wide Web. More recently he was Principal Architect at Blockstream, a Bitcoin technology company, leading blockchain standards efforts. Christopher is co-chair of the W3C Credentials CG working on standards for decentralized identity. He facilitates a series of semi-annual design workshops called “Rebooting the Web of Trust”, which over 3 years has generated over 50 collaborative white papers with top experts in the world about the next generation of internet privacy, security, and identity software. Christopher has also been a digital civil liberties and human-rights privacy advisor, was part of the team that led the first UN summit on Digital Identity & Human Rights, and was the producer of a half-dozen iPhone and iPad games, and of Infinite PDF, a non-linear media app. Christopher offers cryptocurrency classes and workshops, has taught Technology Leadership classes in the sustainable MBA program at Pinchot University, and was part of the faculty team that designed a totally integrated first-year sustainable business curriculum. Since 2003 Christopher has been sharing his experience at his blog www.LifeWithAlacrity.com, where he discusses a variety of topics including entrepreneurship, the social web, internet security, and collaboration.