And He Thinks He's Built the Fastest Cryptocurrency

One of the founders of the cypherpunk movement has just revealed new technology that he believes will revolutionize cryptocurrency from this moment on.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, the grey-haired, digital money pioneer David Chaum is launching a new cryptocurrency Elixxir via his startup.

One of the most influential digital money pioneers leading up to bitcoin, the famed cryptographer has been sleuthing around cryptocurrency conferences recently - dropping hints here and there - sparking theories about what exactly he's been up to.

One is to change digital signatures, a crucial cryptographic component of cryptocurrency, used to verify whether someone owns the cryptocurrency they say they do.

According to Chaum, the way digital signatures are computed in most cryptocurrencies today is just a hassle.

The public key cryptography used in Elixxir has another impact as well - it futureproofs the cryptocurrency for the era of quantum computers.

Within the Elixxir architecture, Chaum believes "True privacy" can be achieved through so-called "Multi-party computations" - a term he coined decades ago and a feature that's used for enhanced privacy in cryptocurrency projects like Zcash and Enigma.

The gist of the system is that a bunch of developers or nodes are involved in a cryptocurrency computation, but only one person needs to be honest in order for the computation to work and for the data to stay private.

What brought Chaum to build Elixxir was suspicion and apprehension about the state of the cryptocurrency industry today.

A notable example is when the pseudonymous cryptocurrency blogger WhalePanda dug up the Elixxir website prior to today's announcement, expressing concerns about what he found.