Matthew Green is a Co-Founder at Sealance, a blockchain platform, focused on privacy, identity, and enforcing regulatory compliance. He was also one of the 7 scientists that created Zcash, and is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science field, at Johns Hopkins University. ^[1][2]

Education

Matthew Green's education started at Oberlin College, where he pursued a double degree, graduating 1998 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Electronic Music. Building on his undergraduate studies, Green pursued a Ph.D. in Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University from 2003 to 2008. ^[3]

Career

Matthew Green's career began at AT&T, where he served as Senior Technical Staff at AT&T Labs from June 1999 to June 2004, gaining experience in the telecommunications sector. ^[4]

Following his tenure at AT&T, Green assumed the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Independent Security Evaluators, contributing to the company's endeavors from 2005 to 2011. ^[4]

In 2011, Green became the founder of Cryptography Engineering LLC, where he served as Chief Scientist. ^[4]

Johns Hopkins University

Simultaneously, Green engaged with academia, joining Johns Hopkins University as an Assistant Research Professor from November 2009 to August 2015. His responsibilities included research contributions and academic leadership during this nearly six-year period. During this time, he wrote a blog called "A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering" which became quite popular at the time of release. ^[4][8]

Building on this foundation, he advanced to the position of Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he has been actively involved in research and education since September 2015. Then in July 2018, Green assumed the role of Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, continuing to serve as a computer science professor. ^[4][5]

Blockchain Career

Matthew Green first discovered Bitcoin between 2010 and 2011, where he found himself skeptical about this new technology and initially did not believe it would work. However he shortly realized that Bitcoin could actually work, but with many problems with its inner workings, especially with security. ^[6]

"I discovered Bitcoin in 2010 2011 and my first instinct was there's no way this could work and you know after a couple of weeks I figured out I was wrong about that but I did notice that there were a lot of problems with it and one of those problems was that there was no privacy in Bitcoin"

So throughout his time at Johns Hopkins, he had multiple discussions with his students about cryptocurrency, especially on the topic of coming up with the solution to Bitcoin's privacy issue, whilst preserving decentralization within the web3 space. These discussions led to the idea of a privacy preserving protocol that uses zero-knowledge proof, sparking the idea of Zcash.

"My graduate students and I spent a bunch of time figuring out how to solve that problem and the result of that was ultimately a thing called Zcash which is a privacy preserving currency"

Then in 2014, Matthew Green along with 6 other researchers came together to create Zcash, which was later launched on October 28, 2016. ^[7]

Sealance

In August 2021, Green became a co-founder of Sealance Corp. in Miami, Florida. Currently he serves as a full-time team member, focusing on solving issues with current blockchain platforms including, regulatory compliance, privacy, and compatibility with existing financial infrastructures. ^[4][6]

"We need to figure out how to make it so that people can adopt privacy we can solve some of the problems with privacy tools and that means figuring out how to solve compliance problems and build systems that are compatible with the existing Financial infrastructure"

"Sealance does two or three really important things. The first, is it adds privacy to cryptocurrency, the second is it adds a notion of identity of who you are and the third is it adds this concept of policy that there are things that you can do and there are things that you can't do "