SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--HVF Labs, a San Francisco-based innovation and investment lab, today announced that Internet entrepreneur Max Levchin has officially opened nominations for the annual Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography.
“This annual award is a small token of gratitude to the people dedicating their lives to essential work in securing information in today’s uncertain world,” said Levchin, a PayPal co-founder and former CTO, and now CEO of the financial technology company Affirm. “Never before have Internet security measures and the cryptography behind them played a more important role in the safety and security of every person on the planet.”
Levchin created the award to celebrate recent advances that have had a major impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems. In 2016, the first two award recipients will receive a cash prize of $10,000 each. Levchin views the prize as a seed investment and hopes to attract the interests of other major supporters in order to elevate the prize in 2017 and beyond.
The first award recipients will be announced at the Real-World Cryptography conference at Stanford University in January 2016. The annual conference brings together cryptography researchers with developers implementing cryptography on the Internet, the cloud and embedded devices to strengthen the dialogue between the two communities.
Prize winners will be selected by the Real-World Cryptography conference steering committee, which includes professors from Cornell Tech, Royal Halloway University of London, Stanford University, University of Athens, University of Bristol, University of Connecticut, and University of Florida.
Everyone is eligible. Winners of the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography must attend the award ceremony at the RWC conference to receive the prize. To submit a nomination for the 2017 Levchin prize, please visit the nomination page.
About Max Levchin
Max Levchin is the CEO of Affirm, a next-generation consumer finance company providing shoppers with instant point-of-sale financing for online purchases. Levchin also serves as executive chairman of Glow, an ambitious enterprise that uniquely applies the power of data science to women’s health. Both companies were created and launched from Levchin’s San Francisco-based innovation and investment lab, HVF. Levchin was one of the co-founders of PayPal where we served as CTO until its acquisition by eBay in 2002. In 2004, he helped start Yelp, the ratings and review service where he was Chairman from 2004-2015. That same year he founded Slide, a personal media service for social networking sites, where he was CEO until the company was sold to Google in 2010. Levchin also serves on several boards including Yahoo!, Evernote, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is an active investor in early stage startups.