Electric Coin Co. is pleased to announce our newest board member, Christina Garman. Garman was one of the seven scientists who invented Zerocash, the protocol that would eventually be called Zcash.
She brings strong technical expertise in cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs to the board, which she hopes to leverage to help drive the broader adoption of Zcash and ECC technical innovations.
”By pushing the company’s existing technical strengths and expertise, as well as the excellent team we’ve built thus far, I believe that we can expand Zcash to bring privacy to new and exciting domains,” she said. “My eventual hope is that Zcash can bring the fundamental privacy that people expect from physical cash to the online world and cryptocurrency ecosystem.”
Garman is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, where her research interests focus largely on practical and applied cryptography, namely the design and analysis of real world cryptographic systems. She aims to make it easier to design and securely deploy new and complex cryptographic systems while preventing insecurities from occurring in such systems. Her past work includes work on cryptographic automation and building “keyless CDNs,” as well as exploring the weaknesses of RC4 in TLS and discovering flaws in Apple’s iMessage. Her current work focuses on removing the “human element” from the deployment and analysis of cryptographic systems through the use of cryptographic automation and the development of tools.
Garman received an NSF CAREER Award in 2021, and her work has received a best paper award at ACM CCS and been featured in numerous media, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist.
Garman earned her MS and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where she was advised by Matt Green, another original Zerocash developer. Her undergraduate degrees are in computer science and mathematics, with a minor in physics, from Bucknell University.
She joins current Electric Coin Co. board members Alan Fairless, angel investor and co-founder of SpiderOak; Andrew McLaughlin, an entrepreneur and tech policy activist who served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer under Barack Obama; and Zooko Wilcox, ECC founder and CEO.
