Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

BuilderCryptob. 1974· American

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn founded Zcash, a digital cash that hides who paid whom and how much. He worked on DigiCash with David Chaum in 1996, and in 2009 he was among the first people to write publicly about Bitcoin. He is now chief product officer at Shielded Labs, and in June 2026 he proposed Ironwood, an upgrade that walls off a flawed shielded pool so anyone can check the total supply without seeing individual payments. He also built Tahoe-LAFS, a storage system that keeps files private from the servers holding them.