Bitcoin Veteran Jameson Lopp Named CTO of Crypto Startup Casa

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Casa has elevated Jameson Lopp to CTO eight months after he joined the crypto custody solutions startup as an infrastructure engineer.

The startup has sold more than 500 Casa Lightning Nodes, a device introduced in early September which taps into a second-layer scaling solution for bitcoin transactions called the Lightning Network.

"We've only shipped our first batch, but it's actually conceivable that if our current sales continue at the pace that they have been, by the end of the year Casa nodes could make up 20-25 percent all the Lightning nodes on the network," Lopp told CoinDesk.

Already, Casa nodes constitute roughly 12 percent of the 4,000-or-so nodes operating on the Lightning Network.

The device allows users to just plug in, sync up the full bitcoin node that's included inside, and start operating a Lightning channel within minutes if the user has some bitcoin.

For Lopp, the node is more than just a way to facilitate small everyday transactions in bitcoin through lightning.

A fervent desire to make self-sovereign technical solutions more accessible was precisely what inspired Lopp to leave the institution-centric custody startup BitGo, where he was a backend engineer, to join Casa in March.

In Casa's vault service, which launched this past summer, includes a mobile app that works with the client's own Trezor or Ledger hardware wallets, creating a multisignature storage system where Casa holds just one out of five keys as an emergency backup.

As a service-oriented startup, Casa will focus on tricks and tools to help such subscribers manage long-term bitcoin storage, including inheritance planning and protecting their hardware wallets.

In addition to upkeep on the bitcoin-centric node product and key management service, Lopp will help develop complementary products and investigate how to keep all these devices safely up-to-date when Casa adds support for other blockchain-based assets beyond bitcoin.