Edward Snowden, also known as John Dobbertin, was revealed as one of the six people behind the Zcash protocol.
Edward Snowden, an American technician, special agent and former employee of the CIA and the US National Security Agency, turned out to be one of the developers of the anonymous coin Zcash (ZEC). He said this in an interview with Zcash Media.
In 2016, anonymous developers merged their code pieces to launch the Zcash protocol. “The Ceremony” was also broadcast on YouTube, but the participants’ real names were not disclosed. Such measures were taken to ensure confidentiality, one of the main principles. Anonymity extended not only to the developers’ identities, but also to the parts of the code they were developing for the project.
Prior to the announcement of his direct involvement in the launch of Zcash, Snowden had publicly supported privacy coins. This included the coin he appeared to have been developing. For example, in September 2017, he called ZEC the “most interesting” alternative to BTC, and in February 2019, he claimed that he had never been paid to support Zcash. Snowden has now revealed that he developed the cryptocurrency code entirely on a voluntary basis and was not paid for his services.
Following Snowden’s public admission that he was John Dobbertin, there was no violent reaction from the community, and the value of the coin reacted to this news with a slight increase of around 3%. As of 15:30 (GMT+3), according to CoinMarketCap, the value of ZEC is $151.
Recall that attempts to tighten control over the cryptocurrency market have increased the popularity of anonymous cryptocurrencies, including Zcash.
