Nick Szabo is a cryptographer and computer scientist well known for creating Bit Gold, a predecessor to Bitcoin. Having created Bit Gold, Szabo is considered by many to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. However, Szabo has denied these claims several times.
Szabo is also known as the inventor who developed the concept of a smart contract. He believed that smart contracts could become a ‘highly evolved’ e-commerce protocol and contract law between multiple entities across the internet. Smart contracts would later become one of the core pieces of technology of Ethereum, one of the largest cryptocurrency networks to date.