Ripple chief technology office Stefan Thomas, will give the keynote address at this year’s Blockchain Africa Conference, which takes place in Johannesburg on 8 and 9 March.
Since joining the San Francisco-based company in 2012, he co-created the Interledger protocol (ILP), an open protocol for moving value across ledgers in the same way that information currently moves over the internet.
Ripple provides enterprise blockchain solutions for global payments. Thomas is also known for his open-source software projects, such as BitcoinJS, are widely used in the industry serving millions of cryptocurrency users.
According to the site ventureburn,com “Thomas’s talk is titled “Blockchain – Connecting the world or dividing it?” He will look at his more than seven years working full-time on Bitcoin and Ripple, and give his take on how much progress has been made towards that dream. He will cover the role of ICOs, smart contracts and what blockchainers can learn from the early days of the internet.
Finally, he will talk about the Interledger protocol and how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is using it to make the financial system accessible to everyone.”
Stefan is also the producer of the popular “What is Bitcoin?” video and the founder of the largest website for novice Bitcoin users, WeUseCoins.com. He created a set of open-source Bitcoin libraries called BitcoinJS, which today are maintained and used by Bitcoin businesses of all sizes including BitPay, BlockChain.info, Bitaddress, Coinpunk and others.
Adrian Hope-Bailie, Chief Standards Officer at Ripple, will also join the conference. He represents Ripple as their Standards Officer co-chairing a working group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop new payments standards for the Web and pioneering a neutral and open payments protocol called Interledger, the TCP/IP of the Internet of Value.
