Mike Schmidt joined the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2018 as a product manager at Blockstream and a contributor to Bitcoin Optech. With Optech, he contributes to the newsletters in addition to organizing and presenting technical content at member workshops. Mike has also contributed to Bitcoin Core by organizing events, assisting in running the taproot review sessions, and performing testing and outreach in the space. 15 years experience discovering, understanding, and developing software solutions to achieve customer needs make him success in leading multiple payment system deployments for large institutions.