Madars Virza

I am a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Radius, where we are building transaction infrastructure for the AI economy. Our team comes from MIT, the Federal Reserve, and Circle, building on years of work on high-assurance financial systems.

I co-invented Zerocash and co-founded Zcash. Both relied on libsnark, the efficient C++ library for zero-knowledge proofs, that I co-authored. Cryptographic techniques from our research now underpin core standards in Ethereum and secure billions of dollars in digital assets. Zerocash received the IEEE Test of Time Award at the 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, recognizing work that has had “a broad and lasting impact on both research and practice in computer security and privacy.”

At MIT, I was a Research Scientist at the Media Lab. With my colleagues at the Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, we worked with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Bank of England. With the Boston Fed, we built Project Hamilton, a high-throughput, low-latency transaction processor capable of supporting the full scale of the U.S. economy while safeguarding Americans’ privacy by minimizing data retention in the system core. With the Bank of England, we investigated how privacy-enhancing technologies could strengthen a potential Digital Pound.

At the Media Lab I was also part of Joi Ito’s research group. I am proud of our work with Joi on cryptocurrencies and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, where I was fortunate to be advised by the incomparable Ron Rivest. My Ph.D. thesis, also on libsnark, won the George M. Sprowls Award for Best MIT Ph.D. Thesis in Computer Science. Before coming to MIT I did my undergraduate work at the University of Latvia under the excellent guidance of Andris Ambainis.

The best way to reach me is: madars@mit.edu.

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