The battle to reshape to existing landscape of bitcoin protocol influencers has gained a new ally—leading bitcoin researcher Jon Matonis.

Matonis, who refers to himself as an e-money researcher, is credited for creating the first and leading general price index for bitcoin called the Bitcoin Price Index (BPI). He is also known for founding the Bitcoin Foundation, which served as the industry’s first non-profit trade association originally chartered to provide financial compensation for voluntary protocol code developers and to promote the vision of bitcoin worldwide.

This time, Matonis has joined bitcoin technology research and development outfit nChain as its new vice president for corporate strategy.

“It is imperative that we move towards a status quo where the actual protocol standard is separated from its primary reference implementation, similar to the existing architecture of the Linux kernel and its low-level abstraction layer,” Matonis said in a statement.