Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, also known as Bryce Wilcox, is an American computer security specialist based in Boulder, Colorado. He was born on May 13, 1974 in Phoenix, Arizona. He developed the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store (or Tahoe-LAFS)— a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem that was released under GPL and the TGPPL licenses. Wilcox-O'Hearn is the creator of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence (TGPPL); the designer behind multiple network protocols that applies concepts like self-contained economies and secure reputation systems; part of the development team of ZRTP and the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash function; founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises in Boulder, Colorado; he was the developer of the MojoNation P2P system; and is also a developer at SimpleGeo.

In 1993, Wilcox began developing the concept of digital money while studying computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has referred to a paper by David Chaum, a cryptography pioneer who developed Digicash, the first electric money startup. Wilcox dropped out of college in 1996 for an engineering position at Digicash.

In 2009, Wilcox blogged about Bitcoin on his blog Zooko's Hack Log in a post titled "Decentralized Money". Satoshi Nakamoto, the developer of bitcoin, linked to Wilcox's post in an addendum to a preliminary release of the Bitcoin software on Bitcoin.org.

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn co-founded and acted as CEO of Zcash. The company changed their name from The Zcash Company to the Electric Coin Company in February 2019. The companies legal name remains Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, LLC.

Matthew Green, a John Hopkins University cryptographer, approached Wilcox about leading the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company in 2014. Wilcox agreed in 2015, and they were able to raise $720,000 in seed funding from Naval Ravikant, Pantera Capital and Fenbushi Capital.

JPMorgan adopted Zcash's zk-SNARKs to mask the money moving on its permissioned, enterprise blockchain.