Precursors & Influencers
Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys that helped solve key distribution. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange.
An American cryptologist, best known for his involvement with public key cryptography and co-author of the paper New Directions in Cryptography
An American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor of digital cash. He has been referred to as “the father of online anonymity“,and “the godfather of cryptocurrency“.
He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics.
Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman). He is the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms and of cryptographic hash functions.
Friedrich von Hayek, economist, Nobel prize winner 1976. In his book Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined, he advocates a complete free market in the production, distribution and management of money to end the monopoly of central banks
Cypherpunks
Cryptographer; Co author of PGP 2.0 and the core crypto libraries of later versions of PGP; designer of RPOW. In January 2009, Finney was the Bitcoin network's first transaction recipient.
Computer scientist, legal scholar and Cryptographer. Inventor of bit gold in 1998 and of smart contracts.
Created b-money cryptocurrency system and co-proposed the VMAC message authentication algorithm. The smallest subunit of Ether, the wei, is named after him.
Author of “A Cypherpunk´s Manifesto”. Founder and Admin of the Cypherpunk Mailing list, coining the motto “Cypherpunks write code”.
Former Assistant Chief Scientist at Intel; author of A Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and the Cyphernomicon; a founding member of the Cypherpunks mailing list.
Sun Microsystems' fifth employee; co-founder of the Cypherpunks and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; project leader for FreeS/WAN
Inventor of Hashcash and of NNTP-based Eternity networks; co-founder of Blockstream
Original creator of PGP v1.0 (1991); co-founder of PGP Inc. (1996); co-founder with Jon Callas of Silent Circle
DigiCash and MojoNation developer; founder of Zcash; co-designer of Tahoe-LAFS
aka “St. Jude“. A founding member of the Cypherpunks mailing list. She also wrote “The Cyberpunk Handbook“ and coined the term “cypherpunk“ for computer users dedicated to online privacy through encryption.
Creator of BitTorrent and founder of Chia Network.
WikiLeaks founder, deniable cryptography inventor, journalist; co-author of Underground; author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet; member of the International Subversives.
Next Generation
A whistleblower who exposed war crimes and mass surveillance by U.S. authorities, forced to live in exile in Moscow since 2013.
Free Market Activist, who created Silk Road, running a free marketplace under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts". Influenced by Libertarian philosophy, run the website from 2011 until it was shut down by US Authorities in 2013. On May 29, 2015, he was sentenced to double life imprisonment plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole.
Radical open internet advocate. Co-founder and CEO of NYM, a startup building a decentralized mixnet to end mass surveillance, capable of withstanding powerful global adversaries, even adversaries with government-level surveillance capabilities.
President of Signal Foundation. Privacy & Human Rights Activist. Heavy Critic of Big Tech Corporations using Mass Surveillance Capitalism as monopoly generating Business Model, offering AI based surveillance Tech to the Military Complex.
CEO of Tether, CTO Bitfinex. Under his leadership USDT became the largest United States dollar-backed stablecoin by market capitalization, being used by 350 million people worldwide. With Holepunch he provides open-source services for a decentralized digital world.
Co-founder and CEO of Lighting Labs, scaling Bitcoin with the Lightning Network, enabling fast, low-cost transactions. In a world of mass surveillance, her work is crucial to preserving digital freedom.