Edward Snowden, a government surveillance whistleblower, has revealed that he was instrumental in the development of the privacy token Zcash (ZEC).
A video from Zcash Media includes an interview with Snowden in which he described his role as one of six individuals who had a piece of the Zcash multisignature private key when the project was launched on Oct. 23, 2016.
“My name is Edward Snowden. I participated in the Zcash original ceremony under the pseudonym John Dobbertin,” he says in the video.
Zcash is a decentralized blockchain that conducts transactions using zero-knowledge proofs. Unlike the comparatively transparent Bitcoin (BTC), ZEC transactions cannot be tracked and the amounts sent cannot be established.
Edward Snowden played pivotal role in Zcash
Edward Snowden is a whistleblower who went into hiding in 2013 after revealing U.S. government surveillance practices.
Snowden and five other persons combined their portions of the Zcash private key to launch the project at the Zcash Ceremony. To maintain the project’s premise of anonymity, none of the participants knew who the others were or what fraction of the key they had.
To prevent future counterfeiting of coins or transactions, each person’s key portion had to be destroyed.
Another ceremony participant, Bitcoin engineer Peter Todd, recounted the “legendary lengths the Zcash Ceremony participants went to prevent being hacked.”
Todd stated that he purchased a new computer and loaded all of the necessary programs for the ceremony before placing it in a faraday cage to avoid any unwanted intrusions. A faraday cage is a box that is lined with aluminum foil to reflect wifi signals.
He then drove to a remote location and used a blow torch to destroy his device’s portion of the Zcash private key.
According to Cointelegraph data, news of Snowden’s contribution had no impact on the price of ZEC, which is currently up 1.7% in the last 24 hours and trading at $148.