Steve Ellis is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Chainlink. He has a background in software engineering and product development, with over a decade of experience in the tech industry.

Education

Ellis graduated from New York University with a Bachelor in Computer Science in 2010, where he was also a teaching assistant for the Computer Science department.^[2]

Career

Ellis began his career in the software engineering field. From July 2010 to March 2013, he was a part of Pivotal Labs where he engaged in numerous engineering tasks. His primary focus was on extreme programming, a technique that prioritizes fast delivering small segments of functional software.^[3]

Prior to joining Chainlink, which was founded in 2014, under the name SmartContract.com, Ellis co-founded Secure Asset Exchange and served as its CTO between June 2014 and January 2016. In this role, he facilitated easy online access to a decentralized asset marketplace, enabling users to transact assets securely, and eliminating the requirement for a central overseeing entity. Ellis also built an end-to-end conversion tool that enables users to easily transfer value between different blockchains and even automate the purchase of assets.^[3][5]

Ellis is the co-founder of Chainlink along with Sergey Nazarov, and he currently works as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Chainlink Labs.^[3] Steve Ellis and his team published a white paper on Chainlink in September 2017.^[5] On May 30, 2023, four years after Chainlink went live on the mainnet Ellis took to LinkedIn to share a video of him and Sergey Nazarov telling the Chainlink origin story:

Chainlink launched on mainnet four years ago today. What started as a single price feed on Ethereum is now one of the largest ecosystems in crypto, supporting the DeFi movement since its inception and providing a wide variety of secure and reliable services for its growing user base across other verticals. To look back on the success of the past four years, the Chainlink Labs team has put together a short documentary on the origin story of Chainlink.^[6]

In October 2023, Ellis was one of the speakers at SmartCon 2023, held by Chainlink in Barcelona, Spain.^[4]