Mustafa Al-Bassam

Mustafa Al-Bassam is Co-Founder at Celestia Labs, where he focuses on research and development related to scaling blockchain base layers. His academic work in this area culminated in a PhD from University College London, completed in 2021, with a thesis titled "Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers." He received a BSc in computer science from King's College London.

Prior to Celestia Labs, Al-Bassam co-founded Chainspace, a blockchain protocol using sharding to increase transaction throughput. The Chainspace team was acquired by Facebook in 2019. He also served as an advisor to Nym from October 2019 to November 2021, and previously advised Secure Trading on information security and distributed ledger technology from 2016 to 2019. Earlier in his career, he held an internship at SwiftKey, where he built and optimised systems processing application usage statistics using AWS and Apache Spark, and completed an information security analyst internship at King's College London. In 2016, Forbes listed Al-Bassam in its 30 Under 30 in technology. He was born in Baghdad, Iraq in January 1995 and moved to London at age five. At 16, he was a core member of the hacker group LulzSec, operating under the alias "tflow," and was later affiliated with Anonymous. He pleaded guilty to computer misuse in 2013 and received a 20-month suspended sentence with 320 hours of community service.