Back in the 90’s, Austin Hill recruited Adam Back to join his company called Zero-Knowledge Systems. The company’s goal was to commercialize cypherpunk privacy-enhancing technologies such as anonymous encrypted networking and Mr. Brands’ pioneering protocol for e-cash. The latter is still the most flexible central-server protocol developed to this day. The company did have many successes, but the market just was not ready to accept Zero-Knowledge Systems’ e-cash work at that time.
