# About

Zakura is developed by veteran protocol engineers from the Zcash, Cosmos,
and Celestia ecosystems, as a collaboration
between Valar Group (https://valargroup.dev/) and Project Tachyon
(https://tachyon.z.cash/). 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.
The maintainers' credentials are in the Team list below.

## 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
  (https://tachyon.z.cash/), ZIP Editor
  (https://zips.z.cash/zip-0000#zip-editors); website:
  https://seanbowe.com/
- Dev Ojha — Maintainer; cofounder of Osmosis and a member of the team that
  launched Cosmos; over the past decade he has led research and engineering
  across zk-SNARKs, BFT consensus, and DeFi, with that work 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 is scaling it via Zakura and PIR;
  Affiliations: Valar Group
  (https://valargroup.dev/), ZIP Editor
  (https://zips.z.cash/zip-0000#zip-editors); profile:
  https://github.com/ValarDragon
- Roman Akhtariev — Principal Engineer; Principal Engineer at Osmosis who
  fixed core scaling bottlenecks for all of Cosmos, including merkelized
  database performance; he has 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 (https://valargroup.dev/);
  profile: https://github.com/p0mvn
- Evan Forbes — Principal Engineer; Celestia consensus lead and founding
  engineer who built the highest throughput block propagation (Gbps scale)
  and data availability (Tbps scale) systems in the world; he now focuses
  on novel consensus scaling and next-generation p2p solutions for Zcash,
  has demonstrated how to make Zcash ready for 25-second blocks today, and
  built the new QUIC p2p stack; Affiliations: Valar Group
  (https://valargroup.dev/); profile: https://github.com/evan-forbes
- Adam Tucker — Principal Engineer; West Point graduate, former Army
  officer, and engineer behind Osmosis, relied on when releases
  had to work or an incident demanded immediate ownership; at Zcash he and
  Roman built Token Holder Voting, solved myriad wallet issues, and carried
  the steel-thread Ironwood work through the entire ecosystem's stack;
  Affiliations: Valar Group (https://valargroup.dev/); profile:
  https://github.com/czarcas7ic

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