Eli Ben-Sasson
Technion researcher who carried probabilistically checkable proofs out of complexity theory's back rooms and into blockchains, first via Zerocash and then via StarkWare.
For years Ben-Sasson was a pure PCP theorist, studying how short a proof can get if the verifier only inspects a few randomly chosen bits. In 2014 he co-authored the Zerocash paper with, among others, Alessandro Chiesa, Matthew Green and Eran Tromer. It became the basis for Zcash and its shielded transactions built on zk-SNARKs.
Unhappy that SNARKs need a trusted setup ceremony, he introduced zk-STARKs in 2018, which rely only on hash functions and are therefore also considered quantum-resistant. The same year he co-founded StarkWare to use them for scaling Ethereum. Academics founding companies is common; a company running on a proof system its founder invented is rarer.