Bitcoin's Second-Ever Developer Is Back (With a Big Vision for Crypto)

( source https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-second-developer-returning-crypto/ )
There are early adopters, then there are early early adopters.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the first coder to work alongside bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Martti 'Sirius' Malmi, is joining a team of developers launching a new cryptocurrency called AXE. The project, which is combining Malmi's Identifi online reputation system with decentralized database system GUN, is taking on the long-desired mission of decentralizing the Web.

And Malmi's history in the cryptocurrency space should pique the interest of plenty of enthusiasts.

An amateur college developer in 2009, Malmi played a crucial role in bitcoin's early days as the only active developer working alongside Satoshi – and even striking up a bit of a friendship. He earned Satoshi's trust enough to be given admin access to the website Bitcoin.org, and most of the changes in bitcoin's second code release are attributed to him.

But a couple years in, Malmi followed Satoshi's lead and left the project, thinking bitcoin didn't really need him anymore.

"I felt like bitcoin had already gone from zero to one, so to say. It was already up and running with a growing community and had lots of great developers working on it," he told CoinDesk.

In 2014, then, he started Identifi, with a decentralized architecture that didn't include a cryptocurrency at first.

But as he built – with his eyes on reducing the control web companies like Google and Facebook have – he decided something else was needed that hadn't been tried before and that a crypto token could incentivize its use.

Malmi told CoinDesk: