Dr Maxim Orlovsky
Personal website
I am a transhumanist and cypherpunk doing science, engineering and business activities.
My primary focus is building foundations for the future which will unlock full potential of individuals through technology enabling self-sovereignty, privacy and censorship-resistance, leading to a vertical progress and further humanity evolution into forms much outside of what current collectivistic society can propose or allow.
Area 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
AluVM (functional RISC virtual machine) and Strict Encoding (formal, portable & deterministic encoding for binary data)
Scalable, confidential and censorship-resistant smart contracts
Trust-minimized settlement protocol for decentralized computing with provable game-theoretic properties
Rust framework for developing scalable and performant apps with microservice achitecture
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
Functional declarative language and toolchain for developing RGB smart contrats
in development
Declarative language and toolchain for defining data type libraries with Strict Encoding
in development
I am a contributor (past or active) into a number of decentralization, trustless and privacy-focused projects, including
Most popular rust implementation of bitcoin
Standards defining bitcoin ecosystem
"Decentralized GitHub"
Statictics on opensource contributions made on GitHub
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
I was born in 1980 in Ukraine (it was USSR back those days). In 2006 I have moved to Kyiv and in 2018 to Switzerland.
At school I was much into biology, mathematics and computers; I learned C in 1994, and x86 assembler in 1996, when I was 16. The same year I wrote a local informatics competition and also wrote first virus in raw x86 bytecodes for MS DOS :).
My passion to biology resulted in multiple first places on state biological competitions in 1994-1996 including first place on the World Biological Competition in 1995, for what I received personal grant from the President of Ukraine. This also had opened a door into science; I entered local Medical University and from the first year started performing scientific work on the department of pathological physiology in the field of neuroendocrinology, with emphasize on hypothalamic circuit and neuropeptides produced by the brain. In 2005 for this research I received a National Science Prize, granted by the President of Ukraine (it was a different one, though :).
In 2005 I received invitation from the Lindau Nobel Laureates committee to attend yearly Nobel Laureates meeting – a one-in-lifetime opportunity awarded to most promising world scientists.
In parallel with my scientific activities I was into programming, doing tools for the scientific research. Specifically, in 1997-2006 I had developed and mantained several generations of digital image analysis system, 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 usual university study program and got a PhD degree in medicine (neuroscience) in 2004 at Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology at Kyiv. In two years I moved to Kyiv and started work in this institution, to focus more on scientific studies (before that time I was a Professor Assistant at University, which was taking too much of my time outside of science).
In 2005 and 2006 I had applied and won a grant program from European Union (INTAS) for a post-doctoral research in the field of brain mechanisms of stress management, which was performed at the Bristol University.
In 2007 I got fully dissatisfied with the state of scientific progress at academia and decided to move into technological business. I found my first IT product company doing a "web operating system" in 2007 in London, which resulted in a failure: with the 2008 financial crisis coming I was not able to attract investments to bring the developed product to the market.
In 2009 I had returned back from London to Kyiv and established a software service company there, which lately started doing banking software. This had brought me into digital finance field ("fintech") and into close relations with internals of the banking industry.
In 2010-2014 I was working as a part-time Professor Assistant on the dept. of pathophysiology at the National Medical University at Kyiv – a tribute to my past academic activities, which ended up with a Maidan Revolution, when we also had removed the rector of the University due to the corruption; however the new rector was not in favor of our "revolutionist" activities and cancelled contracts with all participants of the "uprising".
By that time I also got quite dissatisfied with the inefficiency of the modern financial industry, and together with other players in banking industry we had created Ukrainian Bitcoin Foundation in 2014, which promoted bitcoin and blockchain technologies to the government and National Bank. The results of our activity are globally known: Ukraine had become leading country in bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption with one of the most liberal rules.
In 2017 I decided to quit business in Ukraine and focus on developing technologies and global business in the field of decentralized systems and its 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.
Last modified 3mo ago