The RWC series of events was initiated by Kenny Paterson and Nigel Smart in
2012, as part of a celebration at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge
to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing.
At that point the workshop title was
``Is Cryptographic Theory Practically Relevant?''.
The following year Dan Boneh joined the group to run a similar event
at Stanford.
The event was renamed ``Real World Cryptography,''
and with that the conference was born.
In 2018 the conference joined the IACR and became an IACR event.
The Levchin prize for real-world cryptography was created in 2016.