Carl Youngblood, MSc
Carl Youngblood, MSc is the Cofounder and President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, a religious nonprofit that promotes “abundant flourishing through the compassionate use of science and technology,” and a software engineer and technology entrepreneur with more than twenty-five years of experience in blockchain technology and highly scalable web applications.
Carl cofounded the association in 2006 with our Lincoln Cannon and other founding members, has served on its board of directors for two decades — including earlier service as its Vice President — and has led it as President and Chief Executive Officer since December 2020. The association’s more than 1,200 members explore the intersection of science, technology, and religion, working to persuade secular audiences that religion and science are not mutually exclusive, and religious audiences that science and technology are essential aspects of the divine.
In 2026, the association marks its twentieth anniversary with MTAConf 2026, themed “Signs and Wonders”. Carl’s addresses at the association’s annual conferences span more than a decade: watch A Mormon Perspective on Transhumanism from 2012, his 2022 conference address Web3 and the Promise of Decentralized Governance, and his 2024 talk Algorithmic Advent, or browse all of his talks and presentations.
He examined the AI alignment problem through a Latter-day Saint theological lens in his 2023 essay Algorithmic Advent for Wayfare. He has also fielded community questions in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit’s r/mormon forum. Between 2017 and 2022, Carl cofounded and ran Blockscale, LLC, a blockchain infrastructure firm whose clients included MyCrypto, the open-source Ethereum wallet, and the Tezos Foundation, which supports the Tezos proof-of-stake blockchain; the firm led the deployment of the foundation’s baker infrastructure during the Tezos mainnet launch and was acquired by Coinbase in 2019.
From 2019 to 2021, he was Senior Solutions Architect for blockchain at Amazon Web Services, where he headed solutions architecture for Amazon Managed Blockchain, a fully managed service for deploying blockchain networks on Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. He created and oversaw the service’s technical training content, built its Track-and-Trace Supply Chain Workshop, and led the company’s internal technical field community on blockchain.
From 2017 to 2019, he was Chief Technology Officer of Mainframe, a secure platform for fully decentralized applications, where he helped develop the platform concept, authored its technical whitepaper, recruited much of its engineering team, and presented the platform around the world. He went on to write Solidity smart contracts for Kingdom Studios between 2021 and 2022, and from 2023 to 2024 he was Chief Technology Officer of Crescendo Technologies, a staffing platform that connects companies with graduates of BYU-Pathway Worldwide.
Carl’s software engineering career stretches back nearly three decades. In 2016, he became the first technical hire and Vice President of Engineering at Divvy, building the initial engineering team of the Utah corporate spend-management startup that Bill.com acquired for approximately $2.5 billion in 2021. He was previously a senior software engineer at Podium, the customer-communications platform, and Chief Technology Officer of The World Table, where he directed the development of a consensus-based comment-moderation platform from inception to launch.
Between 2009 and 2014, he spent five years as a senior engineer at Cisco in Oslo, Norway, developing the company’s TelePresence Management Suite for large-scale videoconferencing deployments. In 2007, he cofounded Confreaks, LLC, one of the first companies to publish the proceedings of technology conferences online, selling his share in 2009 when he moved to Norway.
Earlier, he was an embedded software engineer at The Boeing Company between 2004 and 2006, working on security infrastructure for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Future Combat Systems program, and, between 1999 and 2000, a senior engineer and manager of strategic projects at Omniture, the web analytics company later acquired by Adobe for approximately $1.8 billion. He began his career in 1997, developing educational software for K–12 classrooms.
Carl earned his MSc in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2006 and his B.A. in Portuguese, with a minor in Music, from Brigham Young University in 2002. He is certified in Portuguese-to-English translation by the American Translators Association.
Carl is a frequent guest on podcasts exploring the future of religion and technology. Listen to Mormon Transhumanism with Carl Youngblood on Mormon Stories, Carl Youngblood on Transhumanism and Mormon Myth-Breaking on A Thoughtful Faith, The Mormon Transhumanist Movement on Based Camp, and How Will Tech Shape the Future of Family? on The Soloists.
An amateur musician and a member of the Barbershop Harmony Society since 2015, Carl lives in Provo, Utah, and speaks Portuguese and Norwegian.
Visit his homepage, LinkedIn profile, and GitHub page, home to more than a hundred open-source repositories. Follow him on Facebook and X. Read his Substack.