Ian Grigg

Grigg built the Ricardo payment system at Systemics in the mid-1990s, back when digital money was still the preserve of academics and cypherpunks. The problem he kept running into was that an issued asset needs a contract that legally binds the issuer. His answer was a text document with legal prose and machine-readable parameters, signed and identified by its own hash.

His 2005 paper on triple-entry accounting proposed adding a signed receipt held by a third party to the classic double-entry ledger — an idea blockchain advocates later borrowed with enthusiasm. Grigg has always cared more about governance and contracts than about the cryptography itself, which makes him something of a rarity in the field.