I am delighted to announce the hiring of our first full-time scientist/developer. Peter Todd is a heavy-hitter with a deep knowledge of the bitcoin network and a long track-record of doing great theoretical work on crypto-currencies. He initially had some very harsh words for the Mastercoin project, but like many of you, he forms his opinions based on data and logic, and is willing to change them when the data and logic change. I’m proud to say that after further review and seeing our progress to date he is now excited to be involved with this project.

Peter’s role will be largely research-oriented. We will look to him to find attack vectors and suggest changes to the spec as needed to avoid them. He will also be contributing code towards these same goals.

Peter will go wherever these attack vectors lead him, including recommending ways to jump to a different block chain if that ever becomes necessary. Everything Peter does will be open-source and completely available for others to learn from and use.

Peter is currently wrapping up other responsibilities, and hopes to start full-time on Mastercoin February 1st.

Note: I know you’ll all be glad to hear that our #1 priority is hiring developers for new features. However, those hires are in various stages of negotiation, or for various reasons can’t be announced yet. The hires that we can currently announce shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we are not working very hard on hiring feature-focused developers as soon as humanly possible. I hope we’ll be making several more announcements on this front soon.