Paolo Ardoino serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Bitfinex. Paolo seemed destined to fill this role from his earliest interaction with computers, quickly becoming obsessed with hardware, networks, and cryptography. After his graduation from Genoa’s Computer Science University in 2008, Paolo started working as a researcher for a military project focused on high availability, self-recovering networks, cryptography. Throughout this role, Paolo refined his knowledge of distributed systems and experimented extensively with cryptography. Interested in finance, Paolo began developing financial related applications in 2010 and founded his first startup as CTO in late 2013. Backed by two financing investment rounds, his company developed a comprehensive, cloud-based financial application for advisors, fund managers & institutions, and served numerous small and medium sized companies throughout London, Milan and Lugano. Paolo eventually joined Bitfinex as Senior Software Developer in 2014, tasked with trading engine development, platform scalability and high-availability. Later in 2016, Paolo transitioned to the role of CTO during which time he further refined his genuine passion for distributed systems, high-performance computing, and extreme-resilient platforms. As CTO of Bitfinex, Paolo’s role is to manage the development team, evaluate new technologies, design and develop the Bitfinex backend platform. In addition to this, Paolo also serves as Lead Backend Developer and Lead Matching Engine Developer at Bitfinex.