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| Age | 47 |
| Place of birth | Pheonix, U.S. |
| Place of residence | Denver, U.S. |
| Category | Technology |
| Known for | Building crypto systems and founding Zcash |
Biography:
“Zooko” Wilcox-O’Hearn is an American computer scientist famous for developing secure and resilient network protocols for storage and value transfer. Wilcox is also the founder and CEO of Electric Coin Company, the for-profit company developing the privacy-centric cryptocurrency Zcash.
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn's 2019:
2019 was a busy year for the Electric Coin Company, Zcash Foundation, and Zcash community, with impressive R&D accomplishments and difficulties securing sustainable runway. The ECC is currently working on mapping a sustainable development roadmap by presenting proposals to the Zcash foundation on changes to the ongoing developer-funding process.
In September, an ECC engineer announced a solution for scalable and trustless cryptographic proofs called “Halo,” which could remove the need for trusted setups in distributed computation systems. The tech can be applied to securing and scaling blockchain networks including Zcash. In November, Zooko donated the Zcash trademark to the Zcash Foundation, further securing the project and supporting its decentralization.
What Cointelegraph expects for 2020:
The new year kicked off with a long-awaited SDK release providing the means to bring Zcash’s private “shielded” transactions to mobile. We expect that ECC will continue its impressive R&D efforts throughout the new year while working to secure a sustainable development roadmap with the Zcash Foundation. While privacy coins like Zcash face particular regulatory scrutiny, the very cryptographic innovations by ECC and other teams could allow privacy-preserving means of auditing, verifying and authenticating data.