Dr Maxim Orlovsky
Personal website
I am a transhumanist and cypherpunk performing scientific, engineering and business activities.
My primary focus is building foundations for the future - foundations, which will unlock the full potential of individuals, enabling self-sovereignty, privacy and censorship-resistance. This is the future of vertical progress and humanity's evolution into forms much outside of what current collectivistic society can propose or allow.
Expertise
Areas of my expertise include:
Neuroscience & Medicine (pathophysiology)
Evolutionary biology
Complexity science (emergency, non-linear science, cellular automata)
Machine learning and artificial intelligence
Distributed computing
Programming languages and virtual machines
Applied cryptographic systems
Game theory
Digital finance and legal systems
Engineering work
Protocols & Technologies
Scalable, confidential and censorship-resistant smart contracts - the programmability layer for Bitcoin & Lightning
Trust-minimized protocol for decentralized computing with provable game-theoretic properties
Rust framework for developing scalable and performant apps with microservice achitecture
Software Products
A suite of software, hardware products and cloud services for sovereign individuals, which include bitcoin, Lightning & RGB wallet, self-issued identity management & end-to-end encrypted communications
Software running RGB smart contracts
Lightning node implementation supporting decentralized data network Storm, generalized lightning channels and RGB
Languages and Compilers
Functional declarative language and toolchain for developing RGB smart contrats
in development
Declarative functional language and toolchain for defining data type libraries
in development
Other contributions
I am a contributor (past or active) to a number of decentralization, trustless and privacy-focused projects, including
Most popular rust implementation of bitcoin
Bitcoin Standards (BIPs)
Standards defining bitcoin ecosystem
"Decentralized GitHub"
Activism
I have founded or being an active participant and adviser to the following projects aiming to change the status quo of the existing balance of powers in the world:
A private investment fund & think tank for breakthrough & moonshot transhumanistic technologies
since 2011
Research laboratories investigating biologically-inspired cognitive architectures
since 2014
Non-profit developing smart contracts for digital finance and legal settlements on top of bitcoin & lightning network
since 2019
A project and company focused on enabling physical protection of private individuals with autonomous weapon solutions
since 2017
Bio, awards
I was born in 1980 in Ukraine (it was USSR back in those days). In 2006 I moved to Kyiv and later, in 2018, to Switzerland.
At school I was fond of biology, mathematics and computers: I learned C in my 14 in 1994, and x86 assembler in 1996, when I was 16 (I had written my first virus in raw x86 bytecodes). The same year I won a regional informatics competition.
My passion for biology resulted in the first prizes I took on biological competitions in 1994-1996 multiple times, including the first prize on the World Biological Competition in 1995, for which I received a personal gift from the President of Ukraine. I entered the local Medical University and from the first year started performing scientific work in the department of pathological physiology in the field of neuroendocrinology, researching hypothalamic circuits and neuropeptides produced by the brain. In 2005 I received a National Science Prize, granted by the President of Ukraine.
In 2005 I received an invitation from the Lindau Nobel Laureates committee to attend the yearly Nobel Laureates meeting – a one-in-lifetime opportunity awarded to the most promising world scientists.
In parallel with my scientific activities, I continued programming, doing tools for scientific research. Specifically, from 1997-2006 I developed and maintained several generations of digital image analysis systems, which used cellular automation, cluster analysis and neural networks for automatic detection, measurement and classification of biological cells and objects on microscopic images. This system was used in 6 different PhD works, including my own.
I was doing research during my student years in parallel with the usual University study program and got a PhD degree in medicine (neuroscience) in 2004 at Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology in Kyiv (BIPH) just two years after University graduation with the research work performed during student days. In two years I moved to Kyiv and started to work at BIPH.
In 2005 and 2006 I won a grant from the European Union (INTAS) for post-doctoral research in the field of brain mechanisms of stress management, which was performed at Bristol University.
In 2007 I got fully dissatisfied with the state of scientific progress at academia and decided to move into technological business. I founded my first IT product company doing a "web operating system" in 2007 in London, which resulted in a complete failure: with the 2008 financial crisis coming I was not able to attract the investments required to bring the already developed product to the market.
In 2009 I returned back from London to Kyiv and established a software service company, which lately started doing banking software. This brought me into the fintech and into close relations with the internals of the banking industry.
Dissatisfied with the inefficiency of the modern financial industry, together with other players in the banking sphere in 2014 we had created Ukrainian Bitcoin Foundation, which promoted Bitcoin and blockchain technologies to the government and National Bank. The results of our activity are globally known: Ukraine had become the leading country in bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption with one of the most liberal rules.
In 2017 I decided to quit the business in Ukraine and focus on developing technologies and global business in the field of decentralized systems and their applications. I also decided to spend time only on things which may have a global impact and enable vertical progress, changing the status quo of the stagnating human civilization – the story told on this website in the sections above.
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