Madars Virza

I am a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Radius, where we are building financial infrastructure for the AI economy. AI agents will need to transact autonomously at a cost that today’s payment rails can’t touch. Radius builds on insights from Project Hamilton, our work with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The network scales to millions of smart contract transactions per second, and payments cost fractions of a penny. Our team comes from MIT, the Federal Reserve, and Circle, drawing 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 where I was part of the Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. My DCI colleagues and I worked with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to build Project Hamilton — a transaction processor designed for the full scale of the U.S. economy, safeguarding Americans’ privacy by minimizing data retention in the system core. At DCI we frequently collaborated with central banks; with the Bank of England, we explored 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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