Zcash Unveils Edward Snowden as Final Member of Privacy Coin’s Setup Process

 

Privacy coin Zcash (ZEC) has revealed that Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, is John Dobbertin, the final pseudonymous participant in the coin’s trusted setup process.

The announcement was released by Zcash Media, a division of film production house 37 Laines, in an interview with Snowden which was included in The End of Zcash’s Trusted Setup: Who is John Dobbertin? video.

“When we started Zcash in 2016, a trusted setup process was the only scientific option for preventing counterfeiting, while still using strong encryption to ensure privacy,” Zooko Wilcox, CEO at Electric Coin Company, the entity behind Zcash, said in a statement.

“I recruited people who I knew could be trusted to act with integrity, and for that purpose, I reached out to Edward Snowden to be one of the six members of the original Ceremony,” he said. The team can finally “let go of the last secret from the original Ceremony, the identity of John Dobbertin.”

Snowden confirms his role in the process, saying in the video the “reason that I did that was I saw it being worked on by a number of trusted academic cryptographers, and I thought it was a very interesting project”.

Snowden is a former intelligence officer who served at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and later worked as a government contractor. He is currently the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a crypto enthusiast. Last year, the whistleblower raised some ETH 2,224 to benefit the body through the sale of an NFT.

In 2013, federal prosecutors charged Snowden with three felonies in relation to his role in leaking classified information about the US surveillance programs. The same year, a federal court ruled the program exposed by Snowden was illegal. Since 2013, he has resided in Russia.

At 10:23 UTC, ZEC, ranked 62nd by market capitalization on CoinGecko, traded at USD 151 and was up 2% in a day. The price is down 22% in a month and 37% in a year.

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