Dan Smidt
Dan Smidt is the originator of TLSNotary, one of the earliest protocols for cryptographically proving web data to a third party. In April 2013, years before Ethereum launched, he posted the idea on the Bitcoin Talk forum as a way to make peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange trustless, then developed the original protocol with Adam Gibson and oakpacific, publishing the 2014 whitepaper that framed TLSNotary as a mechanism for independently audited HTTPS sessions and shipping the PageSigner browser extension. After the web's migration to TLS 1.2 broke the original design, the project was revived with modern multi-party computation and zero-knowledge techniques, and Smidt now works on TLSNotary within the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team. He posts as @ds4t86.