Zooko Wilcox
Zooko Wilcox is a computer scientist and entrepreneur known for his work on decentralized systems and cryptography. He is the founder and CEO of Electric Coin Company, the organization behind the cryptocurrency Zcash. He has also been involved in several other projects related to decentralized systems and digital currencies, including the Tahoe-LAFS distributed file system and the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash function. He is also a researcher and speaker on digital privacy and security.
Zooko's triangle is named after Wilcox-O'Hearn, who described the schema that relates three desirable properties of identifiers in 2001. Wilcox-O'Hearn was the founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises in Boulder, Colorado, where he is now an advisor. Zooko was a developer of the MojoNation P2P system, a lead developer of the follow-on Mnet network, and a developer at SimpleGeo.
Wilcox-O'Hearn worked on the first cryptocurrency, DigiCash, with David Chaum in 1996. He is a member of the founding team of the anonymous cryptocurrency Zcash, which launched in 2016. He currently serves as the CEO of the affiliated Electric Coin Company. Wilcox later commissioned the Rand Corporation to study whether anonymous coins were disproportionately represented in criminal transactions; the study found they were not.
