About
Zakura is developed by veteran protocol engineers from the Zcash, Cosmos, and Celestia ecosystems, as a collaboration between Valar Group and Project Tachyon. The two teams are primarily responsible for improving Zcash's scalability, and largely responsible for the implementation and coordination of Ironwood, Zcash's next network upgrade.
Team
Sean Bowe
Maintainer
Cofounder of Zcash and the project's first engineer. He designed and implemented Zcash's zk-SNARK cryptography for the network's 2016 launch and for every upgrade in the decade since, coauthoring several of the academic papers behind that work. He now leads Project Tachyon, the effort to bring recursion to Zcash, as well as Ironwood, the network's next upgrade.
Affiliations: Project Tachyon, ZIP Editor
Dev Ojha
Maintainer
Cofounder of Osmosis and a member of the team that launched Cosmos. Over the past decade, he has led critical research and engineering across zk-SNARKs, BFT consensus, and DeFi. That work is deployed in production systems securing hundreds of billions of dollars in value. He now leads Valar Group, which has built Token Holder Voting for Zcash, is making the chain post-quantum, and scaling it via Zakura and PIR.
Affiliations: Valar Group, ZIP Editor
Roman Akhtariev
Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer at Osmosis who fixed core scaling bottlenecks for all of Cosmos. His first week involved fixing the hardest pain-point for all chains, performance of the Merkelized DB. Roman finds the problem everyone else is living with, and he'll design, implement and quickly eliminate it. He's already demonstrated how fast PIR can let wallets sync, built token holder voting with Adam, and removed the CPU bottleneck of Zakura sync.
Affiliations: Valar Group
Evan Forbes
Principal Engineer
Celestia consensus lead and founding engineer. He built the highest throughput block propagation (Gbps scale) and data availability system (Tbps scale) in the world. He now focuses on novel consensus scaling and next-generation p2p solutions for Zcash. He's already demonstrated how to make Zcash ready for 25s blocks today, and built out the new QUIC p2p stack
Affiliations: Valar Group
Adam Tucker
Principal Engineer
West Point graduate, former Army officer, and indispensable engineer behind Osmosis. Adam was the person teams relied on when releases had to work, users were affected, or an incident demanded immediate ownership. He combines relentless testing and taking extreme ownership. At Zcash, he and Roman built Token Holder Voting, solved myriads of wallet issues, and has done the steel-thread Ironwood through the entire ecosystem's stack.
Affiliations: Valar Group