DigiCash

Sources differ on when DigiCash was founded. Two American Banker articles of April 28 and May 6, 1997, say David Chaum founded DigiCash in Amsterdam in April 1990; CWI’s article of November 2019 also gives 1990; and a 2018 Bitcoin Magazine article says that by 1990 David Chaum had founded DigiCash, a little under ten years after his first blind-signature papers, based in Amsterdam, where he had been living for a few years. The Forbes article of November 1, 1999, instead says he started DigiCash in 1989, and a 2019 Decrypt explainer places the founding in late 1989. An American Banker article of November 10, 1998, calls DigiCash an “eight-year-old venture” created by David Chaum.⁠[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry says David Chaum started DigiCash to build an online currency “as secure and private as cash in the physical world.” CWI’s article says DigiCash was to provide financial institutions with a system for secure and anonymous digital micropayments, and that its head office was in the Matrix building at Amsterdam Science Park. ERCIM News calls DigiCash a spin-off that emerged from David Chaum’s research work. An American Banker article of April 6, 2000, says David Chaum founded DigiCash Inc. from his adopted home city of Amsterdam to license the system to banks, earned several patents on it and trademarked the name “eCash.”⁠[5][3][8][9]

The American Banker article of May 6, 1997, says David Chaum had been affiliated since 1984 with Amsterdam’s Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), and had ended that affiliation about a year and a half before the article.⁠[2]

In CWI’s 2020 interview David Chaum recalled that one day, in his office at CWI, he was contacted by Rijkswaterstaat, which saw highway-speed road tolls as the only way to solve the country’s traffic problem but considered them unacceptable without privacy; a team of students he put together demonstrated a solution in 10 days, an eCash payment completed within a meter of road travel at 100 kilometers per hour, with Amtech as partner for the radio link. Bitcoin Magazine says DigiCash worked on a government project to replace toll booths, which was eventually cancelled, and on smart cards, and that its flagship product was eCash.⁠[10][4]

The eCash timeline on David Chaum’s personal website lists, under the heading “World’s First Digital Cash Payment,” a DigiCash press release of May 27, 1994, “World’s first electronic cash payment over computer networks.” In CWI’s 2020 interview David Chaum said DigiCash made the first payment over the Internet at the first WWW conference in Geneva. Bitcoin Magazine says that after four years of development the first successful eCash payments were tested in 1994.⁠[11][10][4]

David Chaum’s personal website says eCash was launched online as its own currency, CyberBucks, and was also issued under license by banks around the world in national currencies. The website’s timeline dates the start of the CyberBucks trial to October 19, 1994, linking The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry article “Attention Internet Shoppers - E-Cash Is Here”; on January 6, 1995, DigiCash announced that the trial was now worldwide. Bitcoin Magazine says the trials began later in the same year as the first payments, and that banks could license the technology from DigiCash.⁠[11][4]

In the 2020 Unchained podcast David Chaum recalled that the deal was that anyone who put up a shop and accepted eCash would get 100 CyberBucks from him; he also said that once The New York Times and others picked up the news the company sent out, “it was all over the global media in about 48 hours.” A 2019 Decrypt explainer says one million CyberBucks were created and issued to early adopters and enthusiasts during the trial, with no more created; users bought everyday items such as shirts or CDs online; and after the company collapsed some enthusiasts kept trading CyberBucks on an email-based trading floor. A Deseret News article of October 23, 1995, says David Chaum stated that the 11-month Internet trial, run with play money, had attracted more than 30,000 users and 70 merchants.⁠[12][6][13]

The website’s timeline also lists other items of the period: Wired’s “E-Money (That’s What I Want)” of December 1, 1994 (by Steven LevySteven LevySteven Levy is an American technology journalist and author, editor at large at Wired, who has written about the digital revolution and the people behind it for almost four decades; his books include Hackers, Crypto and In the Plex.Open the full entry, as Bitcoin Magazine names the author); DigiCash’s announcement of February 14, 1995, of a cost breakthrough in secure chip technology for smart cards; the NYUNew York UniversityNew York University is a private university in New York City, founded in 1831, and one of the largest private universities in the United States.Open the full entry Stern School of Business paper “Digital Cash & Monetary Freedom” of April 1995; and The New York Times article “INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; Export Approved for Software To Aid Commerce on Internet” of May 8, 1995.⁠[11][4]

On October 23, 1995, DigiCash issued a press release announcing a partnership with Mark Twain Bank of St. Louis, MissouriMissouriMissouri is a state of the United States bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital is Jefferson City, its largest city is Kansas City, and its second-largest is St. Louis. It was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,154,913.Open the full entry, which it called the first bank to launch electronic cash; the timeline also lists two New York Times items of the same day, “BUSINESS DIGEST” and “Today, Shoppers on Internet Get Access to Electronic Cash.” The same day American Banker wrote that the Netherlands-based DigiCash was beginning its push into the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry that day, naming Mark Twain Bancshares of St. Louis as the first U.S. licensee of its Ecash system, and noted that electronic money innovations were usually introduced at big banks, making this arrangement an exception. Bitcoin Magazine says that by late 1995 eCash was licensed to its first bank, the Mark Twain Bank in St. Louis. In the 2020 Unchained podcast David Chaum also mentioned that DigiCash had Mark Twain Bank in the United States.⁠[11][14][4][12]

A Deseret News article of the same day says Mark Twain Bancshares, a regional bank holding company in St. Louis, began offering electronic cash on the Internet that Monday, using technology developed by the Amsterdam-based DigiCash; it describes David Chaum as a mathematician and an expert on protecting privacy in the information age. The article says the system was geared toward small purchases and would let small companies reach a global audience with little investment; unlike card payments, which put cardholders’ numbers in encoded software envelopes, the DigiCash software created a new form of currency; the U.S. government had made no policy statement on digital currency, and no one had said that Mark Twain Bancshares could not go ahead. The article also says that less than $200 million in business had been done on the Web the previous year, all through credit or debit card transactions, with security concerns and the absence of a cash-type payment system as the main reasons.⁠[13]

A later American Banker article on Frank Trotter, a vice president of Mark Twain Bancshares, says he was 41, had been with the bank for 15 years, called himself a “missionary” for Ecash and believed online payments should be as anonymous and untraceable as cash. Mark Twain Bank had announced its Ecash program the previous October; about 1,000 people had Ecash accounts, with 10,000 expected by April or May; by late January only 25 merchants accepted Ecash, and more than 125 were setting up their sites. The bank charged customers an $11 setup fee and a $1 monthly surcharge to buy Ecash in dollars, and the system was closed, so both customer and merchant needed Mark Twain Bank accounts. The article says the Missouri bank, with offices in three states and about $2.8 billion in assets, had hired two people solely to handle Ecash inquiries; its president and chief executive, John P. Dubinsky, said he “couldn’t be more pleased” with the experiment. Among the first merchants to sign up was Maryland Public Television, which was selling only some poetry and songs on its site as a test and planned soon to accept Ecash for more popular products, including transcripts of Wall Street Week, with Husky Labs coordinating the experiment for the station; Pentagon CDs of Los Angeles was soon to join, offering 150,000 compact disks and cassette tapes for Ecash.⁠[15]

The same article says David Chaum’s sales calls to many major banks had drawn lukewarm responses and that DigiCash was at first wary of partnering with a regional bank like Mark Twain Bank; Frank Trotter said it took DigiCash a little while to take them seriously. David Chaum described the deal “more as a marketing experiment than as a rollout,” said it did not indicate the company’s strategy, and said DigiCash was “very much involved in discussions with large retail financial institutions” and was “close to announcing a major deal.” The article says this was the first time Ecash had gone live with “real money”; that Sweden Post planned a similar service later that year; and that critics considered Ecash too difficult to use and too expensive to attract a mass following. Forrester Research analyst David E. Weisman said, “People don’t like to have to ‘buy’ cash.”⁠[15]

The timeline on David Chaum’s personal website lists these DigiCash press releases of 1996: on March 13, DigiCash and EUnet opened online payments in Finland, which the release called the first European electronic cash system open for business on the Internet; on March 26, DigiCash opened an office in Australia and signed a worldwide smart card technology deal with Mars Electronics International; in the same year it announced that Deutsche Bank would issue eCash; and on October 24, Advance Bank became the first bank to provide eCash in Australia. The timeline also lists The New York Times article “Regulators Turn Spotlight on Cybermoney” of September 19, 1996.⁠[11]

An American Banker article of March 15, 1996, says DigiCash had reached a deal to offer its digital cash system through EUnet, Europe’s leading Internet service provider; Ecash, designed for low-cost purchases over the Internet, made its debut that week in Finland, where Merita, the country’s largest bank, began letting depositors move money from regular accounts into a virtual “purse” of digital coins to spend at six participating merchants.⁠[16]

Bitcoin Magazine says that by early 1996 Deutsche Bank had come on board, followed later by Credit Suisse, by the Australian Advance Bank and by banks in Norway and Austria. In CWI’s 2020 interview David Chaum said, “We issued our own Cyber Bucks and then Deutsche Bank issued Deutschmarks using our eCash.” In the 2020 Unchained podcast he said that Deutsche Bank, then the largest bank in Europe, decided to back DigiCash.⁠[4][10][12]

The Google Patents record shows that U.S. patent 4,759,063, “Blind signature systems,” was filed by David L. Chaum on August 22, 1983, and granted on July 19, 1988; on November 29, 1996, David Chaum assigned it to DigiCash Incorporated; and on December 17, 1996, DigiCash Incorporated granted a security agreement on it to Technologies for Information and Entertainment.⁠[17]

The timeline on David Chaum’s personal website lists two DigiCash press releases: on April 2, 1997, Nomura Research Institute licensed eCash technology for use in Japan, and on April 14, Bank Austria and Den norske Bank announced that they would issue eCash. An American Banker article of April 24, 1997, says DigiCash had licensed its E-cash online payment system to the largest banks in Austria and Norway, Bank Austria and Den Norske Bank, which said they would enable customers to buy catalogue items, software and news articles over the Internet; the digital money resides on a personal computer’s hard drive.⁠[11][18]

On April 28, 1997, DigiCash issued a press release announcing that it had appointed a chief executive, increased outside investment and was moving its headquarters to CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry. American Banker wrote the same day that DigiCash had named Michael Nash, a former Visa International and Amdahl executive, president and chief executive officer, succeeding David Chaum, who would continue as chief technology officer, and that the company planned to relocate to Silicon Valley in California.⁠[11][1]

The American Banker article of May 6, 1997, says Michael Nash had helped conceive Visa Cash at VisaVisaVisa Inc. is one of the world’s leaders in digital payments, with roots going back to 1958, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.Open the full entry from 1990 to 1995, then served as marketing director of Amdahl’s SmartGroup division, where he worked on the Mondex project, and before Visa had worked in several international posts for American ExpressAmerican ExpressAmerican Express Company is a payments company headquartered in New York that issues credit and charge cards and operates its own payments network; founded in 1850, it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry; he was 46, born in Boston, held a bachelor of science degree in psychology and urban planning from Tufts University and an MBA from Boston UniversityBoston UniversityBoston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It traces its origins to the Newbury Biblical Institute, a Methodist theological school founded in Vermont in 1839, was chartered as a university in 1869, and has been a member of the Association of American Universities since 2012.Open the full entry. DigiCash had used the U.S. recruitment firm Ramsey/Bierne Associates for a nine-month search, and Michael Nash was among the final candidates drawn from an initial 70 files. David Chaum said he had never met the job description of a full-time chief executive, called Michael Nash the inventor of Visa Cash, a product “not dissimilar” to DigiCash’s chip card product, and was to serve as chief technology officer, commuting between Amsterdam, where DigiCash was formed, and a new Silicon Valley headquarters yet to be selected, and concentrating on the smart card aspects of E-cash and on product development.⁠[2]

The same article says Nicholas Negroponte, an MITMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry professor, founder of the MIT Media Lab and author of “Being Digital,” was acting chairman of DigiCash’s board and said DigiCash was “no longer an R&D company”; he had made a personal investment in DigiCash the previous year, and Applied Technology Investors of Boston, in which he held a 12% general partner stake, had closed a convertible loan to DigiCash a few weeks earlier. The privately held DigiCash added two major investors: David Marquardt, a general partner of August CapitalAugust CapitalAugust Capital is a San Francisco Bay Area venture capital firm co-founded in 1995 by David Marquardt and John Johnston. It primarily backs early-stage information technology businesses and makes selected later-stage investments. Its investment history includes Epinions, Shopping.com, Splunk, BILL and UpGuard. The firm’s brand, management services company and individual funds are distinct entities.Open the full entry in Menlo Park, who had earlier invested in IntuitIntuitIntuit is an American financial software company founded in 1983 by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx. It began with the personal finance program Quicken and now offers TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, among other products. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and trades on Nasdaq as INTU. NVIDIA director Suzanne Nora Johnson was long a director and chair of its board.Open the full entry, Sun Microsystems and Verifone, became an investor and director, and the European firm Gilde Investment Management invested from its $120 million IT Fund. Michael Nash joined the expanded board. DigiCash had grown from 12 to more than 25 employees and had sales and support staff in Amsterdam, Singapore and Sydney.⁠[2]

The same article says that Deutsche Bank, Advance Bank in Australia and Nomura Research Institute in Japan were then pilot users of E-cash; Bank Austria, Den Norske Bank of Norway, Merita Bank in Finland and Mark Twain Bancshares in St. Louis were already live; and Postgirot Bank in Sweden had licensed the technology but had not begun open testing.⁠[2]

The American Banker article of November 10, 1998, recounts that in 1997 DigiCash attracted venture capital interest from David Marquardt of August Capital, described as an early backer of Microsoft, among others; the company reconstituted its board with Nicholas Negroponte as chairman and hired “professional management” led by Michael Nash, a former American Express and Visa International executive. Forbes says that by 1997 DigiCash had venture backing and had signed a St. Louis bank as its first client, raising more than $10 million from investors including David Marquardt. Bitcoin Magazine says that by 1996 DigiCash employees had seen one failed deal too many; the company then hired the Visa veteran Michael Nash as chief executive and received a fund injection.⁠[7][5][4]

The timeline on David Chaum’s personal website lists a press release of August 4, 1997, “Shopping with Secure Payments on the Internet - Deutsche Bank Starts eCash Pilot with 1500 Clients.” American Banker’s 2000 article says Deutsche Bank had piloted eCash since 1997. The timeline also lists a DigiCash press release of September 1997 saying that the future of Web success relies on converging the micropayment model with privacy technology.⁠[11][9]

On December 11, 1997, DigiCash and Nomura Research Institute announced an alliance in Japan. The same day an American Banker article said that the pioneering digital commerce company, at “the ripe old Internet age of seven,” was “doing the California thing”: it had undergone a “face-lift,” reached an amicable “virtual separation” with its founder and started a new life on the “left coast.”⁠[11][19]

The American Banker article of November 10, 1998, says William Zuendt, a former president of Wells FargoWells FargoWells Fargo & Company is an American bank whose employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts, leading to regulatory penalties and a $1.95 trillion asset cap from the Federal Reserve that was lifted in June 2025.Open the full entry, joined DigiCash’s board in June 1998, joining Nicholas Negroponte, David Marquardt, David Chaum, Toon den Heijer of Gilde Investment Funds and others on the board; the timeline on David Chaum’s personal website lists American Banker’s report “Former Wells Exec Joins Digicash Board” of June 4, 1998.⁠[7][11]

An American Banker article of June 16, 1998, says Credit Suisse of Zurich had started an Internet commerce project that month using DigiCash technology for micropayments, and describes it as part of DigiCash’s “eight-year struggle” to bring eCash into the mainstream.⁠[20]

An American Banker article of August 25, 1998, says DigiCash, still frustrated in trying to sell U.S. banks on its Internet payment system, had named Scott Loftesness, a former Visa International and First Data executive, chief executive officer; he had joined two weeks earlier, succeeding Michael C. Nash, another veteran of Visa International, whose tenure at DigiCash had lasted a year and a half.⁠[21]

The American Banker article of November 10, 1998, says Mark Twain Bank, DigiCash’s only U.S. participant, had been acquired by Mercantile Bancorp. of St. Louis about 20 months earlier, and that Mercantile ended its three-year eCash experiment in September. The trial had 5,000 eCash customers, about 20 percent of them in the bank’s eight-state Midwest territory and the rest on the two coasts, holding “significantly less” than $100,000 in eCash accounts. Larry Kirschner, Mercantile’s senior vice president of foreign exchange, said eCash “was not profitable from the moment we inherited it” and “We didn’t see a strategic fit for eCash,” adding that the public “did not have any insecurity and did use their credit cards on the Internet.”⁠[7]

American Banker’s 2000 article says the only U.S. DigiCash trial was led by Frank Trotter of Mark Twain Bank; Frank Trotter said that Mercantile, which bought Mark Twain Bank in 1997, did not want to spend money to expand the program; Mercantile was later bought by Firstar of Milwaukee. Forbes says Mercantile pulled the plug after a three-year trial that signed up only 5,000 customers whose combined accounts totaled just $100,000. Bitcoin Magazine says that by 1998 Mark Twain Bank had enrolled only 300 merchants and 5,000 users.⁠[9][5][4]

In November 1998 DigiCash, based in Palo Alto, California, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; the American Banker article of November 10, 1998, says the filing was announced “last week.” The same article says the interim chief executive, Scott Loftesness, intended to see the Chapter 11 process through and to seek financing and partners to broaden eCash’s appeal; he said the company had a significant “intellectual property portfolio” that could prove useful in other applications requiring privacy and anonymity, such as electronic voting, while the article says DigiCash had never exploited the full potential of its patents to generate licensing income. The article says DigiCash’s staff had peaked at about 50 and had since been cut significantly, and the operation remaining in Amsterdam had been closed; the design of eCash and its anonymity principles had attracted widespread attention in 1994 and 1995, and through consulting projects and demonstrations it had come close to assembling a network of banks to issue the virtual currency, but the licensee group, including Deutsche Bank, Den Norske Bank, Bank Austria, Advance Bank of Australia and Mark Twain Bank of St. Louis, never got beyond pilot stages. Scott Loftesness called eCash “important and inevitable” and said the board and backers still believed in it, though timing and financing remained open questions.⁠[7][5][9]

The same article records the views of peers and analysts: observers praised the technology’s anonymity and its mechanism that prevents any of the virtual coins from being spent twice. Richard Crone, vice president of CyberCashCyberCashCyberCash was an Internet payments company headquartered in Reston, Virginia, United States. Founded in 1994, it was one of the first companies to offer encrypted credit card payments on the Internet and later added CyberCoin micropayments, PayNow electronic checks and payment software; listed on Nasdaq from 1996, it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001 and its operating assets were sold.Open the full entry and general manager of PayNow, its electronic check product, called DigiCash “a payment type in search of an application,” said credit cards had won U.S. Internet consumer payments and that CyberCash’s CyberCoin faced the same problem, while CyberCash had succeeded in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom through financial institution partners: “Digicash did not have the support we did.” David Stewart, vice president of Global Concepts of Norcross, Georgia, said DigiCash had not bridged the physical and virtual worlds and that eCash compared unfavorably with MastercardMastercardMastercard Incorporated is a technology company in the global payments industry whose principal operating subsidiary was formed in November 1966. It is headquartered in Purchase, New York.Open the full entry’s Mondex, Belgium’s Proton and Finland’s Avant, smart cards with an Internet transmission component; eCash needed online validation of tokens spent, so clearing required authorization like a credit card; DigiCash lacked the backing of a major U.S. bank and needed an off-line electronic cash scheme and a serious player in payments behind it.⁠[7]

American Banker’s 2000 article says management problems and the complexity of the system spoiled David Chaum’s plans, and that DigiCash filed for bankruptcy with interest from banks waning.⁠[9]

The Google Patents record shows that on May 3, 1999, Nicholas Negroponte and Technologies for Information Entertainment III, L.P. released their security interest in the blind-signature patent; on July 19, 1999, DigiCash Inc. assigned the patent to DigiCash Acquisition Corporation; and on October 13, 1999, that DelawareDelawareDelaware is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic region on the East Coast, with its capital at Dover and Wilmington as its largest city. On December 7, 1787, it became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, entering the Union as the 1st state, and it had a population of 989,948 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry corporation changed its name to eCash Technologies, Inc. American Banker’s 2000 article says a group of entrepreneurs bought DigiCash’s software and 16 patents and in May 1999 formed eCash Technologies Inc. in Bothell, Washington; only a few of its roughly 50 employees had worked at DigiCash; former DigiCash investors, Nicholas Negroponte among them, stayed in, Thomas Litle of OrderTrust of Lowell, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, was a new investor, and the president and chief executive was Drew Hyatt, formerly president of the financial services division of HNC Software of San Diego.⁠[17][9]

The Forbes article of November 1, 1999, says DigiCash was defunct and that David Chaum had recently sold off its patents; the 1999 item of Decrypt’s timeline says he sold off his remaining patents and exited the company. Forbes says merchants and banks were lukewarm because they wanted the customer data they collected for targeted marketing, and consumers were unmoved; David Chaum explained, “It was hard to get enough merchants to accept it, so that you could get enough consumers to use it, or vice versa,” and, as the average user became less sophisticated, “It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them.”⁠[5][6]

The American Banker article of April 6, 2000, says eCash Technologies licensed its software to banks and called itself a “technology enabler”; unlike DigiCash, which required buyer and seller to use the same bank, eCash used an open architecture that let them use different banks. Deutsche Bank 24, a retail bank subsidiary that Deutsche Bank opened in September, backed the eCash software, and since February Deutsche Bank had offered an eCash account to new customers of the credit card co-branded by Yahoo and Deutsche Bank. Other banks that had run DigiCash pilots were Credit Suisse, Merita Bank, Bank of Austria, Advance Bank of Australia (by then, the article says, St. George’s Bank), Sakura Bank, Den norske Bank and Mark Twain Bancshares of St. Louis; eCash had taken over the remaining pilots of Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Bank of Austria and St. George’s the previous year, and Credit Suisse later ended its trial; the pilots involved about 30,000 active accounts and 300 online merchants.⁠[9]

The same article says Drew Hyatt projected more than five million consumers and many online merchants within a year; the company was working with wireless providers so that phones or Palm Pilots could store eCash, planned a currency conversion feature, and was negotiating with a regional EFT network, a large Internet brokerage, an Internet-only bank, a regional bank and a monoline credit card company in the United States; because another firm owned ECash.com, eCash Technologies used the address eCash.net. Drew Hyatt cited PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry, which planned to merge with X.com of Palo Alto, and Bank One’s eMoneyMail as other virtual money systems, saying they were “owned by banks.” Frank Trotter, who had led the Mark Twain Bank trial and was then founder and chief executive of the three-month-old Internet-only bank everbank.com, considered DigiCash an ideal business-to-business payment system and wanted everbank.com to license eCash, saying wire transfers, EDI and ACH cost more because they involve multiple steps and a third party. Drew Hyatt said eCash would renegotiate with the pilot banks to “restore relationships and get full-scale commitments,” and eCash said Deutsche Bank planned to change its marketing and raise transaction limits in a new rollout. Yair Frankel said the challenge was making people aware that eCash serves both banks and consumers. Daniel Eldridge, a former DigiCash vice president, was launching VirginData.com, a data harvesting and analysis start-up.⁠[9]

The Google Patents record shows that eCash Technologies then granted security interests in the blind-signature patent to several parties: Trillium Corporation and Ruloff Capital Corporation on September 22, 2000, Imperial Bank on January 2, 2001 (released on September 28, 2001), and eOne Global LP on October 1, 2001.⁠[17]

A filing that InfoSpace submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry on April 3, 2002, says that on February 8, 2002, InfoSpace acquired substantially all of the technology and intellectual property of eCash Technologies, Inc., a developer of electronic debit and stored value technologies, for $2.7 million and 1,064,815 shares of InfoSpace common stock. An American Banker news brief of March 1, 2002, says eCash Technologies of Bothell, Washington, an early Internet firm with an encryption-based digital cash system, was a “reincarnation” of DigiCash Inc., a Dutch company founded by the cryptographer David Chaum that had received considerable attention in the late 1990s and eventually went bankrupt.⁠[22][23]

The Google Patents record shows that the blind-signature patent was assigned to InfoSpace, Inc. on June 24, 2002; on July 19, 2002, Trillium, eOne Global, August Capital, L.P. and others released their security interests; the patent’s anticipated expiration was July 19, 2005, and on August 19, 2010, InfoSpace assigned it to Van Detsan Networks Limited Liability Company.⁠[17]

American Banker’s article on the Mark Twain Bank trial says that with Ecash funds moved from a regular account to the customer’s computer, a balance icon showed the amount, and each purchase was deducted from it; promoters said it suited purchases of $1 or less, for which credit card charges would be cumbersome. Decrypt’s explainer says users withdrew money from their bank accounts to obtain CyberBucks, stored on their PC hard drives, and the receiver could also automatically change CyberBucks into U.S. dollars; payments could be made without the user divulging any personal information, and blind signatures let a bank verify a transaction without the payer revealing private information, which the article compares to a special digital “envelope.”⁠[15][6]

American Banker’s 2000 article says Yair Frankel, eCash Technologies’ chief scientist and formerly a cryptologist at Certco, said eCash allows anonymous or identified payments and explained blind signatures with an analogy of an envelope and carbon paper; Scott Wallace, the company’s senior vice president of marketing, said an authorization takes a second or a second and a half, faster than a credit card authorization.⁠[9]

A 2018 Bitcoin Magazine article relates several deals DigiCash discussed, with hedges such as “said to have”: ING and ABN Amro, two of the three major Dutch banks, are said to have made partnership deals with DigiCash worth tens of millions of dollars; Visa is said to have offered a $40 million investment, and Netscape was interested, so that eCash could have been included in its browser; Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry is said to have wanted to integrate eCash into Windows 95, with MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry offering about $100 million, while David Chaum is said to have asked for $2 for every copy of Windows 95 sold, and the deal was off; and a deal with Citibank came close before the bank walked away for unrelated reasons. The article notes that it is based in part on Steven Levy’s Wired article “E-Money (That’s What I Want)” and on an article by an unknown author in the Dutch Next! Magazine, “Hoe DigiCash alles verknalde” (How DigiCash Blew Everything). Decrypt’s explainer says Citibank negotiated with DigiCash for a long time and expressed interest in using CyberBucks before moving on to other projects.⁠[4][6]

In the Unchained podcast of August 18, 2020, the host, Laura ShinLaura ShinLaura Shin is a cryptocurrency journalist, podcast host and author, a former senior editor at Forbes who founded the crypto media outlet Unchained, hosts its podcast of the same name, and wrote “The Cryptopians,” about the first big cryptocurrency craze.Open the full entry, said that DigiCash had had offers of investment from places such as ING Investment and that there had even been, she thought, a plan for ING Barings and Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry to bring DigiCash to the stock market. David Chaum said in the episode that he had been invited to many central banks and to Visa International and Citibank, and that DigiCash was represented by investment banks in the talks; he said, “I’m not sure that anyone was really interested in the disruptive power of it,” and that “the powers that be wanted to kind of stop this from being what it could’ve been.”⁠[12]

Decrypt’s explainer dates David Chaum’s exit from the company to 1996, and Laura Shin also said in the 2020 Unchained episode that he left DigiCash in 1996 and that it went bankrupt in 1998; David Chaum replied, “I didn’t leave DigiCash in ’96,” and then, “No, in ’94…I don’t know what you’re referring to.”⁠[6][12]

In the same episode Laura Shin said that some sources claimed David Chaum had wanted too much control and that employees felt he was too paranoid, greedy or stubborn; David Chaum replied, “Well, that’s sour grapes.” He said, “people say DigiCash failed. Well, it’s not really true,” and said that it was taken down although there were those willing to invest a good deal more money in it, which the people who got control of the company did not want: “They wanted to kill it.” He also called DigiCash “a very open company.”⁠[12]

A Fortune article of May 15, 2015, says Nick SzaboNick SzaboNick Szabo is an American computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer who developed the term and concept of smart contracts and in 1998 conceived bit gold, a design for digital money often described as a precursor of Bitcoin; he has repeatedly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, and in January 2025 he became chief scientist of JAN3.Open the full entry worked as a consultant for DigiCash in the 1990s; Bitcoin Magazine names Nick Szabo and Zooko Wilcox-O’HearnZooko WilcoxZooko Wilcox is a computer security expert, an early cypherpunk, the founder of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), and the principal initiator of Zcash; his early papers were also signed Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn. He worked on DigiCash, Mojo Nation, Tahoe-LAFS, and cryptographic software research, and led ECC in bringing Zcash to mainnet in 2016. After stepping down as ECC’s chief executive officer in 2023, he joined Shielded Labs in 2024 as head of product and a board member, and in 2025 was appointed a strategic advisor to Cypherpunk Technologies.Open the full entry as DigiCash contributors who belonged to the group later known as the cypherpunks. In the 2020 Unchained episode David Chaum said Zooko “was there for quite a while” and that, while Zooko was in his employ, he paid to help him develop his own competing systems. American Banker’s 2000 article names Daniel Eldridge as a former DigiCash vice president.⁠[24][4][12][9]

Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, released the first Bitcoin software and launched the blockchain in 2009, and stopped public activity around 2011; the person’s true identity has never been confirmed.Open the full entry’s BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry white paper does not mention DigiCash, David Chaum or eCash and does not cite their work; section 2 says a common solution to double spending is to introduce a trusted central authority, or “mint,” that checks every transaction, with each coin returned to the mint after each transaction to issue a new one, so that “the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint.”⁠[25]

A Bitcoin.com News article of February 11, 2022, says that after Satoshi Nakamoto first introduced the Bitcoin project publicly on the P2P Foundation forum on February 11, 2009, others in the thread talked about “old Chaumian central stuff” and failed e-currency projects such as e-golde-golde-gold was a digital currency, described by its issuer as fully backed by physical gold, whose value could be transferred between accounts over the internet; it began operating in 1996 and ceased operations in 2009. Its issuer E-Gold, Ltd., its operator Gold & Silver Reserve, Inc. and three directors were indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury in 2007 on charges including money laundering conspiracy and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, and pleaded guilty in 2008.Open the full entry, and Satoshi Nakamoto noted in his replies that the “old Chaumian central mint stuff” was the only thing available at the time; on February 15, 2009, he wrote, “A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s.”⁠[26]

A 2018 Bitcoin Magazine article holds that Bitcoin and eCash have “little in common” in design: eCash was centralized around DigiCash and could not really be its own currency, since even if everyone used only eCash, banks would still be needed to offer account balances and confirm transactions, so that eCash, while providing privacy, was “not as censorship resistant”; Bitcoin itself does not employ blind signatures, though scaling and privacy layers on top of the Bitcoin protocol could. ERCIM News calls the eCash that David Chaum developed under the DigiCash flag the “precursor” of Bitcoin. In the 2020 Unchained episode David Chaum called himself “a huge fan of bitcoin” and said, “I would say eCash is bitcoin zero.” In the same episode Adam BackAdam BackAdam Back is a British cryptographer and computer scientist, the inventor of the proof-of-work system Hashcash, and a co-founder and the chief executive of the Bitcoin technology company Blockstream.Open the full entry said he had implemented an eCash library implementing the online version of David Chaum’s eCash protocol, that there was a lot of excitement about DigiCash, which was deploying the technology at the time, and that it was for a time deployed in a kind of demo server.⁠[4][8][12]

David Chaum: Personal website: https://chaum.com/ecash/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]