Pioneer in cryptography and cybersecurity will be nominated for the 2025 National Youth Award

Santo Domingo.- A 33-year-old Dominican, a pioneer in the development of a novel cryptographic technology funded by Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency platform in the United States; and who worked for the National Security Agency of that country, the largest cybersecurity agency in the world, will be nominated by the Naar Foundation for the National Youth Award 2025. Originally from Moca, Espaillat province, Juan Luis Vargas Molina is a mathematician who graduated from the University of Charlotte, North Carolina. Subsequently, he won the postgraduate student scholarship known as "NSF RTG Graduate Student Fellowship", from the Mathematics Program at the University of Georgia, Athens, both in the United States. In 2015, at just 23 years old, he was called upon by the National Security Agency (NSA) to offer him the opportunity to work on important projects to protect the interests, integrity, and well-being of the American nation. To support the pioneering work of the Dominican mathematician, Coinbase, a company operating in 100 countries, awarded him a US$100,000 prize in 2022 through the Developer Grant Competition, a contest sponsored by its Crypto Community Fund. The result was the design, in six months, of FACT0RN, a blockchain project (“blockchain”) that allows the creation and decentralized management of goods, products, services, consortia, companies, and financial instruments through the use of software based on that technology.

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The "blockchain" project FACT0RN is a creative solution in the technical field, because it solves acute problems to which mathematics and computer science had not found an answer, strengthening security in mining and cryptocurrency transactions. Architect Kelvin Naar, president of the foundation dedicated to the promotion of national art and culture, reported that the Creole inventor will be a candidate for the National Youth Award in three categories: Professional Achievement, Personal Achievement and Accomplishments; and Young Dominican Abroad. "The Naar Foundation considers that the graduate Juan Luis Vargas Molina is a genius in the area of mathematics and its application in computer science, due to the number of unprecedented computer solutions he has put at the service of humanity. Therefore, we will nominate him in the coming days for this important award granted by the Dominican Government to young Dominicans who transform reality for the better."

Other inventions by Vargas Molina

Although most of his work is classified or protected by confidentiality agreements, due to the nature of clients such as megacorporations valued in trillions of dollars, Vargas Molina has made several of his creations available to mathematicians and software engineers. The Dominican mathematician designed "MuchPIR", one of his inventions in the area of "Private Information Retrieval", cited in master's dissertations in countries like the Netherlands. "This is a digital system for information retrieval, in such a way that whoever performs the search never knows what was searched for or if what was searched for was found. I implemented it for the first time in the real world and made it public about five or six years ago. I also have an unpublished version that is much faster," he explained. Vargas Molina assured that his work contributes to improving business, banking, academic, investment fund, and research activities in Subject of mathematical factorization applied to the RSA security algorithm, on which the security of all the world's banks depends. This cryptographic system is so important, added the Creole inventor, that RSA Labs, the corporation founded with this technology, currently has a market value of more than 300 million dollars; "and anyone who works in the management of computer systems specialized in encryption or cybersecurity probably has an RSA Labs token on their keychain".

“Los matemáticos, magos al fin, abstraemos estructuras y patrones; vemos universos de posibilidades en el vacío. Observaciones sencillas en un área nos llevan a resolver problemas aparentemente desconectados en otra; pero, como podemos identificar la esencia, creamos un puente entre las dos. Con relación al Premio Nacional de la Juventud 2025, estoy sorprendido y muy agradecido de ser postulado por la Fundación Naar”, concluyó.