Ben Schiller

Ben Schiller is Head of Communications and Senior Adviser at Miden, a zero-knowledge blockchain built around client-side proving that spun out of Polygon as an independent project in April 2025. Miden announced on 10 September 2025 that Schiller was joining its team, the same day he announced that he had left CoinDesk after six years.

CoinDesk's author biography lists him as a managing editor from 2019 to 2025, and he was managing editor for features and opinion when he left. Before CoinDesk, he was editor-in-chief of Breaker Magazine, a crypto publication launched in 2018 that shut down in 2019, and a staff writer at Fast Company from 2011 to April 2018. Talking Biz News reported in September 2025 that he had covered crypto since 2013. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Sussex and a master's degree from the London School of Economics.

Since April 2026 Schiller has hosted The Privacy Podcast, which Miden introduced as conversations with the technologists, cryptographers, regulators and founders building what it called the new privacy era. Guests have included Miden's co-founders Azeem Khan and Bobbin Threadbare, and an episode was released on 11 September 2026.

In a CoinDesk opinion piece published on 22 April 2026, Schiller argued that the debate over whether blockchains need privacy is over, and that the question left is what sort of privacy the industry builds. He contrasted privacy that depends on trusting an intermediary with zero-knowledge cryptography, which can prove that a transaction is valid without revealing the underlying data, and wrote that regulatory compliance does not require that everyone can see a user's transactions.

Schiller spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as the moderator of "The New Architecture of Digital Cash: Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits and Money Market Funds", a panel on the Hecto Main Stage on 3 June 2026, the summit's second day. The panellists were Emma Landriault, David Cunningham and Tero Reuna.

Schiller also wrote the play Happenstance, billed by its organisers as the world's first bitcoin play, which was performed at the Kraine Theater in New York's East Village in October 2024. It follows a man facing prison for his role in the early development of Bitcoin.