Spinning Off Our Sibling Company

The Zcash company grew out of a company named “Least Authority”. It was when we were Least Authority that we did a security audit of Ethereum and several other successful security audits (CryptoCat, GlobalLeaks, SpiderOak, and Ooni). Least Authority also developed the advanced cryptographically-protected, decentralized file store, Tahoe-LAFS.

When we formed a new company to launch Zcash (the “Zerocoin Electric Coin Company”, a.k.a. “The Zcash Company”), we split off from Least Authority and at first I tried to continue acting as the CEO of both companies at once. Perhaps I was influenced by the legends of Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, two people who currently serve as CEOs of two different companies.

But you know what? No way was that going to work. The run-up to the Zcash launch consumed all of my time and attention, and the Least Authoritarians continued to develop their cutting-edge open source technology, but they had to do so without any business support from me.

Therefore I’m delighted to announce that our sibling company, Least Authority, now has a new full-time CEO: Liz Steininger. I’ve worked with Liz before on Internet freedom technology; I trust her ethics and her judgment. Her excellent skills at organization, planning, and business are a good match for the excellent cryptography and coding skills of the other Least Authoritarians.

Least Authority has incorporated in Berlin, Germany (the world capitol for Internet freedom hackers) and launched a new web site. The team continues to do specialized security audits and create freedom-compatible technologies, and has some big things in the works that you’ll hear more about soon, including a user-friendly way to use their secure storage product.

Right now you can sign up for Least Authority’s “S4” service, which is a cloud storage service built on top of Amazon S3, with the addition of our advanced open source end-to-end encryption so that your data is never exposed to snooping or injection.

(P.S. For fans of cryptocurrency history, here’s that time I posted about Tahoe-LAFS on BitcoinTalk.org back in 2010 and Satoshi Nakamoto replied.)

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