NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made waves in 2013 when he released a swath of privileged documents on the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which included programs designed to spy on citizens in the U.S. and other countries.
Some 10 years after his exile from the U.S., Snowden is living quietly in Russia. He helped start a nonprofit called Freedom of the Press in 2014 and spun up a Twitter account last year. However, besides the surprise appearance or comments about the surveillance state — and federal judgments saying that the program he revealed was illegal and potentially unconstitutional — we haven’t seen much about Snowden in the headlines…
Until about two days ago.
Snowden confirmed in a leaked video that he was one of the six individuals who helped create the cryptocurrency, Zcash. Snowden was apart of a “ceremony” which helped create the crypto and its patently strong security and privacy. Until now, the Zcash community knew Snowden as John Dobbertin, a pseudonym he invented for safety purposes.
Snowden says in the leaked video that he did it because he “saw it being worked on by a number of trusted academic cryptographers,” and thought it was an interesting project. He added that crypto has been used to “ensure it’s a fair ledger … rather than a private ledger.” He adds that he didn’t contribute to the crypto’s core product, but was simply involved in the cooperation of the “ceremony.”
Nearly six years after its initial release, Zcash has proven to be a strong, private alternative to Bitcoin. It takes after the world’s largest cryptocurrency in many ways: it has a supply limit of 21 million and a similar halving system. However, if not for Snowden and the five other members involved in the mysterious ceremony which helped build it, the $2.68 billion cryptocurrency might not have ever came to be.
$ZEC dropped 12.9% today, which we assume was unrelated to the Snowden news. After all, the market is kind of on fire right now.