For the fifth consecutive year, the 2021 Levchin Prize winners were recognized with custom, interactive, kinetic awards created by Bennett Awards. Presented annually, the Levchin Prize recognizes entrepreneurs who have made significant contributions to solving global, real-world cryptography issues.
In 2017, Bennett Awards worked with the Real-World Cryptology Conference to create a new, kinetic, interactive custom award design for the Levchin Prize. This 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 housed 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 groups of recipents of the 2021 Levchin Prize. The first group was the research team of Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller, for their invention of elliptic curve cryptology. The second honoree was the Tor Project, for their continued development of the Tor system and underlying cryptology.