- Edward Snowden has revealed that he was part of the Zcash development team
- Snowden took part in ‘the ceremony’ which launched the cryptocurrency
- The Moscow resident appeared in a Zcash video yesterday
Edward Snowden yesterday revealed how he helped create the privacy coin Zcash. The NSA whistleblower, who lives in Moscow, made his surprising claim in a video from Zcash posted yesterday which revealed that Snowden was the man behind the moniker John Dobbertin, one of six people who helped create the cryptocurrency. Zcash was released in October 2016 after more than three years of development, with each of the six developers possessing a portion of the launch key, which they all destroyed subsequently.
Snowden Joined Out of Sense of “Public Interest”
Development of Zcash was started in 2013 by Johns Hopkins professor Matthew Green and some of his graduate students, with the project completed by the Zcash Company (now the Electric Coin Company), led by Zooko Wilcox, a Colorado-based computer security specialist and cypherpunk.
It is not clear when Snowden came on board, but in the video, which celebrated the Zcash ‘ceremony’ (the process that launched the cryptocurrency), he says that he offered his services out of a sense of “public interest”.
Zcash Offered Privacy Solution
In the short video, Snowden said that the reason he got involved was because Bitcoin’s only failing was that of privacy (something Snowden, of course, cares a lot about), and he thought that Zcash offered the best solution to date for those who wanted to transact privately.
His contribution to the project ended with ‘the ceremony’, with fellow developer Peter Todd recently describing the great lengths gone to by its participants – Todd bought a new computer and installed all the required programs for the ceremony, before placing the computer in a faraday cage (a box lined with aluminum foil, which deflects WiFi signals) so as to prevent any unwanted intrusions.
Once the ceremony was over, Todd drove to a remote area where he took a blow torch to his computer in order to destroy his portion of the Zcash private key.
