A man poured most of his money into a struggling tech company, went through a divorce, and started sleeping in a parking garage. He went on to help build Zcash. – In the 1990s, Zooko Wilcox was already working on digital money, long before Bitcoin existed. – He worked at DigiCash, an early attempt to build electronic money. The company failed, but the idea stuck with him. –He kept exploring decentralized systems and privacy technology. – Then Bitcoin launched in 2009 and showed the world that digital money could work without a central authority. – But Bitcoin had a problem: its transactions were visible on a public ledger. – In 2013, a group of researchers began working on Zerocoin, a proposal to bring more privacy to Bitcoin. – The research evolved into a new cryptocurrency called Zcash. – Zooko was asked to help lead the project. He initially turned it down. – By the summer of 2015, he'd invested most of his money in another company he founded, Least Authority, and was going through a divorce. – He wanted to stay in Boulder so he could keep taking his children to school. At times, that meant sleeping in his car in a parking garage. – He eventually committed to the Zcash project. – On October 28, 2016, Zcash launched, using advanced cryptography to let users shield transaction details. – And the privacy work hasn't stopped. – Today, Zcash developers are tackling another challenge: future quantum computers. – Zakura has proposed giving every ZEC swap through NEAR Intents its own viewing key, limiting how much transaction history a compromised key could expose. – A man who spent decades working on digital money helped turn a privacy research project into a live cryptocurrency. Imagine if he'd given up when things got difficult.