Anders Brownworth is a cryptocurrency researcher focused on scaled architectures.

He started his career at Dow Jones in New York City where he worked on a real-time rendering system for displaying market data on WBIS+, an on-air television station owned by Dow Jones.

After building an internet operations department for Imagine Media in the San Francisco Bay Area, he moved to North Carolina to work at Bandwidth eventually leading research and development. While at Bandwidth, he helped create and launch Republic Wireless, a WiFi-first MVNO, which became an standalone business and was ultimately sold to Dish Network.

At Bandwidth Anders started to look at Bitcoin which demonstrated the ability to come to consensus on state changes without a trusted intermediary, something potentially applicable to the telecom industry given its gatekeeper model. As the cryptocurrency industry started to form, he transitioned to Circle shortly after its founding where he worked as a software engineer. He built a number of internal systems and the backend for Circle Trade, then one of the world’s largest OTC players.

During his time at Circle, Anders co-taught the first blockchain class at MIT, MAS.S65. Realizing there wasn’t much good public content on the topic, he used what he learned teaching at MIT to create a blockchain explainer video that became popular on YouTube. This work led to other engagements at MIT, Harvard and Yale.

While at Circle, Anders helped create and launch USDC, now one of the largest stablecoins in the world. Continuing the exploration of a digital dollar, Anders moved to the Federal Reserve to work on Project Hamilton which was a joint research effort between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.

Project Hamilton’s research focused on permissioned systems for global scale payments in Central Bank Digital Currency. The Hamilton effort produced papers an open source codebase implementing several CBDC designs, one of which is capable of processing millions of transactions per second and another capable of scaling Ethereum smart contracts. A version of the first paper out of the Hamilton project was accepted and presented at the NSDI 2023 conference in Boston.

Currently, Anders is a Senior Advisor at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative and is working on a startup in Cambridge called Radius.

While outside of work, Anders likes to run and is a licensed helicopter pilot.

Anders can be reached via direct message on Twitter at @anders94.