Probably this crowd already knows about Daemen for AES and Moxie from Signal and NYTimes and his HN comments here. Trevor Perrin might not be as familiar of a name, but it should be. He's responsible for much of the meaty crypto underlying the Signal Protocol, and his most recent project, Noise [1], is a real marvel. A prize well deserved.
This prize is awarded at the Real World Crypto conference, which has become a pretty big deal. RWC is unlike normal academic crypto conferences in that it hosts practical engineering work and case studies from people deploying crypto --- but the attendance list includes many leading people in the academic field.
Last year's Levchin winners were Phil Rogaway (a cryptographer of fame comparable to that of Joan Daemen) and the miTLS team (which discovered the Triple Handshake, SMACK, FREAK, Logjam, and SLOTH TLS attacks).
Dan went into a little more of the backstory last year during the first awarding of the Levchin prizes. If I recall correctly, he and Max had been long time acquaintances and Dan even advised Max while he was working on some of the early PayPal technology. Max told a story about Dan leaving his own birthday party to help Max debug a CSPRNG.
Probably this crowd already knows about Daemen for AES and Moxie from Signal and NYTimes and his HN comments here. Trevor Perrin might not be as familiar of a name, but it should be. He's responsible for much of the meaty crypto underlying the Signal Protocol, and his most recent project, Noise [1], is a real marvel. A prize well deserved.
[1] http://noiseprotocol.org/