Ian Miers
American researcher who, as a PhD student, wrote Zerocoin and Zerocash — the papers that became the Zcash cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin was long sold as anonymous, yet every transaction sits in the open on the blockchain for anyone patient enough to follow the money. In 2013 Miers, together with Christina Garman, Matthew Green and Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins, proposed Zerocoin: an extension that let coins be laundered through a cryptographic proof rather than a trusted mixer.
Zerocoin was heavy and leaked amounts. The following year brought Zerocash, co-authored with Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa and others, which used zk-SNARKs to hide sender, recipient and amount alike. It launched as Zcash in 2016. Miers has kept working on privacy and messaging security, now as a professor at the University of Maryland.