Dev Ojha

Ojha was a member of the founding engineering team of Cosmos, working on Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK.⁠[1][2]

In September 2019, the paper “Fractal: Post-Quantum and Transparent Recursive Proofs from Holography,” co-authored by Ojha with Alessandro Chiesa and Nicholas Spooner, was submitted to the IACR ePrint archive. The paper presents a new method for recursive composition of succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) that does not rely on cycles of pairing-friendly elliptic curves, is post-quantum secure, and uses a transparent, public-coin setup; a revised version appeared at EUROCRYPT 2020. At the time Ojha and Spooner were both students of UC Berkeley professor Chiesa, and in January 2020 the two discussed the paper on the Zero Knowledge podcast. He also contributed to the zero-knowledge proof papers Aurora and Marlin.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][4][1]

Starting in January 2025, Ojha published a series of Zcash research pieces on X that Valar Group later listed as its research: in January 2025 on private search algorithms and the shortcomings of the TipToe scheme; in February 2026 on how private information retrieval (PIR) can deliver post-quantum privacy and on a “quantum recoverable” scheme that would let wallet funds be recovered after quantum computers arrive; and in May 2026 on what an attack like the one Litecoin suffered would have done to Zcash.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In 2026, Ojha led Valar Group, a cryptography research and engineering team focused on developing the Zcash protocol. His work with the team covers shielded sync, nullifier bloat, post-quantum recoverability, and scaling shielded transactions at the protocol level, and the team also built Zcash’s token holder voting system.⁠[1][2][1]

On May 4, 2026, Ojha and Valar Group engineer Evan ForbesEvan ForbesEvan Forbes is a blockchain consensus and networking engineer who was the consensus team lead and a founding engineer of the modular blockchain Celestia; since 2026 he has worked at Valar Group on Zcash consensus scaling and peer-to-peer networking, and with Dev Ojha completed testing on shortening Zcash’s block time.Open the full entry published a test report on the Zcash Community Forum: experimenting with block propagation and stale-block rates at a 25-second block interval on 100 Zebra nodes spread across 19 regions, they concluded that the NU7 upgrade could reduce the target block spacing to 25 seconds provided a large portion of the network adjusted its TCP configuration.⁠[5][5][5][5]

In June 2026, a critical counterfeiting vulnerability was found in Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool; after it was fixed through an emergency network upgrade, Shielded LabsShielded LabsShielded Labs is a nonprofit Zcash support organization based in Switzerland, established as a Swiss association in December 2022. It operates mainly on donations and has never received Zcash Development Fund money or block rewards. It leads protocol proposals including the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) and Crosslink, a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus, and after a researcher it engaged discovered the Orchard counterfeiting vulnerability in 2026, it proposed and advanced the Ironwood upgrade together with other development teams.Open the full entry, together with the Zcash Foundation, Tachyon, Valar Group, and ZODL, proposed a new shielded pool, Ironwood, that would let users verify the circulating supply. Valar Group built a transitional wrapper for users still on the zcashd wallet and, with the Tachyon team, worked on formal verification of the Orchard logic; the Valar Group and Project TachyonTachyon (Zcash)Tachyon (Project Tachyon) is a Zcash scaling upgrade proposal put forward in 2025 by Zcash cofounder Sean Bowe and developed by community members. It uses “oblivious synchronization” and proof-carrying data (PCD) to shrink shielded transactions and cap the state validators must keep, and removes on-chain secret distribution to achieve full post-quantum privacy; as of October 2026 it remained in development, and mainnet activation requires community approval. In 2026 its team also led the formal verification of the Ironwood upgrade.Open the full entry teams were largely responsible for implementing and coordinating Ironwood.⁠[6][6][6][6][2]

On July 15, 2026, Valar Group and Project Tachyon jointly released Zakura 1.0.0, open-source Zcash full-node software. Forked from Zebra and consensus-compatible, Zakura syncs nearly five times faster than Zebra and offers block pruning, snapshot bootstrapping, and a zcashd compatibility mode. Zakura is co-maintained by Sean Bowe and Ojha, and Ojha’s team did most of the engineering and performance work in the first release; both teams are funded by private ZEC donations.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7][7]

On August 5, 2026, Valar Group and Project Tachyon called a coinholder vote on the scope of NU7, held on a dedicated voting chain using audited technology developed by Valar Group to replace the previous token holder voting process. On August 6, Ojha explained the chain’s design on the forum: votes are counted by Ironwood ZEC held at the snapshot height, vote amounts are homomorphically encrypted to a multi-party computation (MPC) committee and only the totals are decrypted at tally time; voting rounds are coordinated by a 2-of-5 multisig with representatives from Project Tachyon, the Zcash Foundation, ZodlZodlZodl refers both to Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), a company developing the Zcash protocol and wallets, and to its Zcash mobile wallet of the same name (formerly Zashi). ZODL was founded in January 2026 by former Electric Coin Company CEO Josh Swihart, with the entire former ECC engineering and product team joining it; it continues core Zcash protocol development and did much of the work on the 2026 emergency fix of the Orchard vulnerability and the Ironwood upgrade.Open the full entry, Shielded Labs, and Valar Group, and the election authority consists of at least 10 validator nodes.⁠[8][8][9][9][9][9]

After voting closed on September 14, Ojha announced the results on X: about 2.4 million ZEC took part, 66% of the 3.6 million ZEC in the pool at the snapshot; majorities supported preserving halvings under the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), beginning reissuance in 2031, deprecating Sprout immediately at NU7, shipping faster block times, and cutting NU7’s scope to what was ready by September 30.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10][10]

On August 12, 2026, Cypherpunk Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed company whose treasury strategy is to accumulate ZEC, announced in its second-quarter results that it had appointed Ojha as an advisor to provide cryptographic guidance.⁠[11][11][11][11][12]

On October 9, 2026, the Network State Conference was held in Singapore, and Ojha was listed as a co-founder of Zakura among the speakers at the opening Zcash Zummit session.⁠[13][13]

Ojha is a co-founder of Osmosis, a decentralized exchange in the Cosmos ecosystem; his X bio reads “Founder of @osmosiszone,” an account that later moved to Osmosis’s official account @osmosis.⁠[2][1][14][15]

Valar Group: Official website: https://valargroup.dev/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

Zakura: Official website: https://zakura.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

Osmosis: Official website: https://osmosis.zone/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

X: Public account: https://x.com/zkDragon (opens in a new window)⁠[1]