Josh Lee

Lee first encountered blockchain through the Dogecoin forum on Reddit, getting to know Dogecoin before he even knew what Bitcoin was. He served in the military for about two years and, after his discharge, originally planned to join a large Korean company, taking a temporary job while waiting for its hiring season.⁠[1][1][1][1][2]

In 2017, Lee’s first job was at a blockchain media outlet in Korea. His editor was an early Cosmos token holder who was then running the Cosmos community; Lee helped him organize a number of local meetups in Korea, later joined the validator company the editor started, and then received a job offer from the Tendermint team and joined it. Lee has said that what drew him to blockchain is that it blends economics, finance, psychology, sociology, and politics.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In 2020, for financial and personal reasons, Lee and developer Tony Yun were spun off from a staking effort they had been involved in and formed Chainapsis, focused on providing public goods, infrastructure, and tooling for the Cosmos ecosystem; in June of that year, when the company was about a month old, he was still also working at Tendermint. Chainapsis joined the second cohort of grant.fish, the funding program of staking provider stakefish, and the two planned to implement the Interchain Accounts standard, whose specification Tony Yun authored, in the Cosmos SDK, and to build the Keplr wallet.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

The idea behind Keplr was to give the growing number of Cosmos application-specific chains a simple signing tool similar to Ethereum’s MetaMask, handling asset management and staking while also interacting with all kinds of on-chain applications such as games. In August 2020, Lee was interviewed on the Citizen Web3 podcast as a community advocate at Tendermint and co-founder of Keplr; the episode described Chainapsis as a Korean company.⁠[1][2][2]

In April 2021, Lee said Keplr’s users had grown from 137 in June 2020 to 33,730, and that many new chains were using Keplr as their wallet interface at launch. He made the first mainnet Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) transaction in Cosmos on Keplr rather than through a command line. The team had at first been just him and Tony Yun, who did not pay themselves from the grant money but saved it to hire developers; by then the team had six full-time employees, three of them developers.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

Around April 2026, Lee introduced Vizor, a desktop wallet his team was developing, on the Zcash Community Forum. On May 14, Vizor was released as an open-source macOS desktop Zcash wallet whose first public release already supported signing with the Keystone hardware wallet; on May 18 he announced the launch on the forum, saying Vizor aimed to make Zcash easy to use for newcomers while offering advanced features for users who want a bigger screen; Windows and Linux versions went live on May 28. He described himself as a newcomer to the Zcash community.⁠[4][5][4][4][4]

Vizor uses shielded transactions by default, hiding amounts, addresses, and transaction history, and is an open-source, non-custodial wallet built by the Keplr team; it offers cross-chain swaps through NEAR Intents, supports Zcash community voting and Keystone air-gapped signing, ships versions for five platforms (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android), and plans a formal third-party audit.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

Zcash activated the Ironwood network upgrade on July 28, 2026, and Vizor shipped its production migration feature that day, helping users move funds from the Orchard pool into the Ironwood pool; the block explorer CipherScan identified Vizor as the first end-user wallet fully compliant with the ZIP-318 migration specification. In this work, Lee’s company collaborated with Valar GroupValar GroupValar Group is a cryptography research and engineering team focused on developing the Zcash protocol, led by Osmosis co-founder Dev Ojha and staffed largely by engineers from Osmosis and Celestia; in 2026 it took part in the Ironwood network upgrade, released the full-node software Zakura with Project Tachyon, and built Zcash’s private coinholder voting chain.Open the full entry on ZIP-318, sync, and usability improvements.⁠[7][7][7]

In August 2026, 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 called a coinholder vote on the scope of NU7 on the Zcash Community Forum and confirmed that two wallets, Vizor and Zodl, would support the voting process.⁠[8][8]

On August 15, 2026, Lee, as product owner, submitted a Zcash coinholder retroactive grant application on behalf of his company, requesting $360,000 for the Vizor wallet work completed from mid-March to August 7, 2026; the applicant was listed as the GitHub organization chainapsis and the organization KPLR, his background was given as CEO and co-founder of Keplr Wallet and Osmosis, and Tony Yun was listed as chief technical officer. The application disclosed that KPLR had raised venture financing for Keplr, that Vizor was funded from company resources, and that it had received no prior Zcash ecosystem funding; KPLR receives a share of the route fee on swaps completed through NEAR Intents within Vizor.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7]

The application was submitted after the third-quarter deadline. Lee explained that he is typically based in Asia but was traveling in the U.S. and miscalculated the time-zone conversion; the Financial Privacy Foundation, which administers the program, replied that it does not accept late submissions for any reason and that he could resubmit in the fourth quarter.⁠[7][7][7]

On October 9, 2026, the Network State Conference was held in Singapore and opened with a Zcash Zummit session, where Lee was listed among the speakers as the founder of Vizor.⁠[9][9][9]

Vizor: Official website: https://vizor.cash/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

Keplr: Official website: https://www.keplr.app/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Osmosis: Official website: https://osmosis.zone/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Chainapsis: Official website: https://chainapsis.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

X: Public account: https://x.com/dogemos (opens in a new window)⁠[14]