Scott Stornetta

Chief Scientist and Partner, Yugen Partners LLC

Role: Fellow

Sites: CDL-Montreal, CDL-Toronto

Streams: Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain/Web3

Scott Stornetta is considered by many to be the co-inventor of the blockchain. Dating back to 1991, his pioneering series of papers, written with co-author Dr. Stuart Haber at Bellcore, received the 1992 Discover Award for Computer Software. This helped lay the foundation for Bitcoin and other digital currencies (for example, of the eight citations in the original Bitcoin paper, three reference his and Dr. Haber’s work). Scott’s PhD was the first neural networks dissertation from Stanford. He finished at Bellcore (then Telcordia) as assistant general manager of the 125-person Mathematical and Computer Sciences Laboratory. He consulted for many years, evaluating the commercial potential of emerging technologies on behalf of universities, commercial research labs, and venture capital interests. Along with Dr. Haber, Scott co-founded Surety, a Bellcore spinoff. Surety’s offering constituted the first commercial deployment of a blockchain. He received his PhD in physics from Stanford University after attending MIT, Harvard, and Brigham Young University.