Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs

Biography

Elizabeth Stark is the current CEO of Lightning Labs, a solution to help Bitcoin scale as a means of payment. Elizabeth is currently a Fellow at Coin Center, a digital currency policy organization. 

Elizabeth was born in Brooklyn and currently lives in San Francisco. She graduated from Harvard University and received a JD from Harvard Law School. Elizabeth has taught at both Stanford and Yale University.

Elizabeth is an incredibly talented Developer, CEO, and all around badass. The Bitcoin community is lucky to have her. 

Twitter: @starkness

Elizabeth Stark Bitcoin Quotes

• “When you change how money is created and valued, there is going to be major pushback” December 2018 [source]
• “The goal of Lightning is to create the payment layer for Bitcoin” 2018 [source]
• “Bitcoin is a marathon, not a sprint” 2018 [source]
• “It’s Bitcoin, you can’t tell people what to do.” 2019 [source]
• “The goal [with Lightning Network] being to enable this instant, near instant, definitely competing with the chip card and being faster than that transaction time.” 2019 [source]
• “Who’d have thought of Wikipedia years prior, decades prior? An encyclopedia that anybody could edit, that sounded insane. I think we’ll see something equivalent and similar with Lightning and just this new economy that emerges that’s this Lightning native economy.” 2019 [source]
• “Bitcoin on chain was not going to be able to handle a billion people’s transactions and building up this layered architecture of which Lightning is a key part. This can really make that possible.” 2019 [source]
• “Within the Bitcoin community and even broadly within the cryptocurrency world, I think there’s this idea that Bitcoin moves slowly. But in fact Lightning is just moving so quickly I can’t keep up.” 2019 [source]
• “The design philosophy embedded within Bitcoin, it’s not move fast and break things. It’s move cautiously and build a secure base layer and then build the layers on top of that.” 2019 [source]

Involvement with Bitcoin

• Elizabeth Stark is the CEO of Lightning Labs, a second layer protocol built on top of Bitcoin. The main goal of Lightning network is to serve as Bitcoin’s payment network. Lightning Network both increases the scalability and privacy of Bitcoin. 
• Elizabeth Stark is a co-organizer of the Annual Crypto Spring Conference

Media Sources

• Elizabeth Stark and Jack Dorsey on Stephen Livera Podcast: February 2019 [source]
• Lightning Is a Payment Network built on top of Bitcoin: April 2018 [source]
• “The Importance of Layer Two”: August 2017 [source]
• “Lightnings Elizabeth Stark is building an Army” December 2018 [source]
• Distributed 2018: Fireside Chat with Elizabeth Stark + Aaron van Wirdum [source]

Related Bitcoin Quotes