The Cryptographic Roots
Before there was a coin there were two papers. Cryptographers at Johns Hopkins design Zerocoin and then Zerocash — schemes to hide who paid whom, and how much, using zero-knowledge proofs. A for-profit company forms to turn the research into real money.
Part of Zcash
3 moments in this segment.
- — May 2013 — the Zerocoin protocol is proposed. Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Christina Garman, and Aviel Rubin of Johns Hopkins publish Zerocoin — a scheme to anonymise cryptocurrency payments without a trusted third party, by "minting" and "spending" coins so their history is erased. It is the academic ancestor of Zcash.
- — May 2014 — the Zerocash paper introduces zk-SNARKs to money. "Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin" is presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Using zk-SNARKs, it hides sender, recipient, and amount all at once — the direct technical basis for Zcash.
- — 2015 — the Zcash company is founded with Zooko as CEO. Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn leads the for-profit Zerocoin Electric Coin Company to build a production cryptocurrency from the Zerocash research, raising over $3 million from investors including Naval Ravikant.
