Silvio Micali
Silvio Micali is an Italian and American scientist and founder of the blockchain project Algorand.
Personal Stats
| Age | 69 |
| Source of Wealth | Scientist, professor, cryptographer, founder of Algorand |
| Residence | USA |
| Citizenship | Italy, USA |
| Marital Status | married |
| Education | Sapienza University of Rome, University of California Berkeley |
Silvio Micali Biography
Silvio Micali was born on October 13, 1954, in Palermo, Italy to Giovanni and Francesca. His father was a civil law judge. Micali had a younger sister, Aurea. Shortly, the whole family moved to Rome, as Silvio's father got a job there.
Silvio Micali Education
In 1972, Micali graduated in mathematics from the Sapienza University of Rome and went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1982. He then did a year of research at the University of Toronto.
Silvio Micali Career
In 1983, he started teaching at MIT, where he is still working in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interest spans cryptography, zero-knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design.
In 1993, he received the Gödel Prize. In 2007, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Moreover, Micali is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
In 2001, he co-founded CoreStreet Ltd. which used Micali's patents to verify the status of digital certificates. The venture capital arm of the CIA invested in this company. In 2009, ActivIdentity acquired CoreStreet. In the early 2000s, Micali also founded the Peppercoin micropayment system.
In 2012, he received the Turing Award for his work in cryptography. In 2015, the University of Salerno honored him by awarding him an honoris causa degree in computer science. In 2017, he was elected as an ACM Fellow.
Micali sought to create a project that retained the ethics of Bitcoin but was scientifically sound. So in 2017, he founded the blockchain project Algorand, where he oversees all research including theory, security and cryptofinance. It is a fully decentralized, secure and scalable blockchain that provides a common platform for creating products and services for a decentralized economy. It uses a unique "Pure Proof of Stake" consensus algorithm that provides secure verification of all transactions and decentralizes the network.
Interesting Fact: It was Silvio Micali's research that made cryptography an exact science. Micali and Shafi Goldwasser, in their joint paper "Probabilistic Encryption," defined probabilistic encryption, semantic security, and computational indistinguishability — the notion of objects that look the same to efficient algorithms.
Silvio Micali Personal Life
Micali has a wife named Daniela and two children, Enrico and Stefano. In an interview, Micali revealed that he met his wife in Cambridge. Daniela is a legal scholar and lecturer at Boston University.
What is Silvio Micali Net Worth?
Micali's fortune is estimated at $7 million dollars. Silvio Micali is a computer scientist, cryptographer, founder of Algorand and works as a professor at MIT.
