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Standing on the shoulders of giants

The pioneers

Blockchains did not appear out of nowhere. Public keys, Merkle trees, proof-of-work and zero knowledge came first. These are some of the people behind them.

  1. Portrait of Whitfield Diffie1976

    Whitfield Diffie

    Public-key cryptography and Diffie–Hellman key exchange, the basis of digital signatures.

    Photo: Duncan.Hull · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  2. Portrait of Martin Hellman1976

    Martin Hellman

    Co-author of “New Directions in Cryptography”, which opened the public-key era.

    Photo: User .:Ajvol:. on en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  3. Portrait of Ralph Merkle1979

    Ralph Merkle

    Merkle trees: summarize and prove block data at logarithmic cost.

    Photo: david.orban · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  4. Portrait of Ron Rivest1977

    Ron Rivest

    Co-inventor of RSA, the most widely deployed public-key cryptosystem and signature scheme.

    Photo: Ronald L. Rivest · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  5. Portrait of Adi Shamir1979

    Adi Shamir

    Shamir secret sharing and RSA, the groundwork for multisig wallets and key recovery.

    Photo: Duncan.Hull · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  6. Portrait of David Chaum1982

    David Chaum

    Electronic cash (eCash) and mix networks, forerunners of private digital money.

    Photo: Web Summit · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  7. Portrait of Shafi Goldwasser1985

    Shafi Goldwasser

    Zero-knowledge proofs with Micali and Rackoff, the root of today's zk-SNARKs.

    Photo: Weizmann Institute of Science · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

  8. Portrait of Silvio Micali1985

    Silvio Micali

    Zero knowledge, verifiable random functions (VRF) and the Algorand consensus.

    Photo: Rguillou228 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  9. Portrait of Adam Back1997

    Adam Back

    Hashcash, the proof-of-work scheme cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

    Photo: Alexleso75 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  10. 2008

    Satoshi Nakamoto

    Bitcoin, the first peer-to-peer electronic cash system and the first working blockchain. Identity still unknown.

    Illustration: identity unknown

  11. Portrait of Vitalik Buterin2013

    Vitalik Buterin

    Ethereum: smart contracts and a general-purpose virtual machine on a blockchain.

    Photo: John Phillips · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

  12. Portrait of Gavin Wood2016

    Gavin Wood

    Ethereum co-founder and Solidity author; Polkadot, a relay-chain architecture for interoperability.

    Photo: TechCrunch · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons