In 2009, an anonymous software developer named Satoshi Nakamoto developed Bitcoin. Run by a network of volunteer computers, Bitcoin has seen explosive growth over the past seven years: going from pennies to nearly $1,000 per coin in the fall of 2016. Yet for all its success, Bitcoin has a key limitation: payments made on the Bitcoin network are public, and thus visible to every participant. In 2014, Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute’s Assistant Professor Matthew Green along with a team of researchers in the JHU Department of Computer Science developed a solution for this. The new system, called ZCash, solves this privacy problem by making payments completely anonymous. In 2016, a private company launched ZCash as a commercial alternative to Bitcoin. As of 2016, the ZCash currency has nearly $22 million in total market capitalization. To read more, click here.