Custom kinetic awards created by Bennett Awards were presented to the 2020 recipients of the prestigious Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptology. Each year, this unique recognition award honors entrepreneurs who have made significant contributions to solving global, real-world cryptography issues. This is the fourth consecutive year that these custom awards created by Bennett Awards have been used for this recognition event.
In 2017, Bennett Awards collaborated with the Real-World Cryptology Conference to create a distinctive, interactive custom award design that recognizes excellence in the practice of cryptography. The award design is based on an interactive puzzle that that award recipients are challenged to solve. The award’s form factor is a cylinder with rotating circular disks that, when properly rotated and positioned, spell out ‘LEVCHIN PRIZE’. Once the disks are to the correct orientation, the award opens a secret inner chamber ihoused the spindle of the cylinder. The inspiration for the trophy is loosely based on the Jefferson Disk wheel cypher and a Cryptex, coined from the fictional writings of Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
There were two recipients of the 2020 Levchin Prize. The first was the duo of researchers Marc Stevens (CWI) and Xiaoyun Wang (Tsinghua University, China), who were recognized for their 'groundbreaking work on the security of collision resistant hash functions. The second award recipient was Ralph Merkle, known as one of the inventors of public key cryptography and cryptographic hashing.