Valar Group

Valar Group’s X account was registered in January 2026. The team is led by Dev Ojha, and its website’s team page lists four members: Cosmos founding engineer Dev Ojha; 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, former consensus team lead at Celestia; Roman Akhtariev, former principal engineer at Osmosis; and Adam Tucker, a West Point graduate and former U.S. Army officer who later became a senior engineer at Osmosis.⁠[1][2][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

On May 4, 2026, Valar Group’s Evan Forbes and Dev Ojha published a test report on the Zcash Community Forum validating the safety of a 25-second block interval on 100 Zebra nodes in 19 regions, concluding that the NU7 upgrade could reduce the target block spacing to 25 seconds provided a large portion of the network adjusted its TCP configuration.⁠[4][4][4]

In June 2026, a critical counterfeiting vulnerability was found in Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool and 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, then proposed a new shielded pool, Ironwood, to let users verify the circulating supply. In this work 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; Valar Group and Project Tachyon were largely responsible for implementing and coordinating Ironwood. Ironwood activated on mainnet on July 28, 2026.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][2][6]

Around Ironwood’s launch, Valar Group worked with wallet developer KPLR on the ZIP-318 migration specification, sync, and usability, eliminating 92% of hot-path calls in the Vizor wallet and fixing a 3.5× sync performance regression. In the third-quarter Zcash coinholder retroactive grant results published on September 29, 2026, “Valargroup Ironwood work” was among the funded projects.⁠[6][6][7][7]

On July 15, 2026, Valar Group and Project Tachyon, led by Sean BoweSean BoweSean Bowe is a cryptographic engineer and researcher, a cofounder and the first engineer of Zcash, who spent years at the Electric Coin Company designing and implementing Zcash’s zero-knowledge proof cryptography and in 2019 introduced Halo, a recursive proof system that needs no trusted setup. Since 2025 he has led Project Tachyon, a Zcash scaling effort, helped lead the 2026 Ironwood upgrade, and maintains the Zakura Zcash full node.Open the full entry, jointly released Zakura 1.0.0, open-source Zcash full-node software. Forked from the Zcash Foundation’s Zebra and consensus-compatible, Zakura syncs nearly five times faster than Zebra and offers block pruning, snapshot bootstrapping, a zcashd compatibility mode, and an experimental peer-to-peer transport layer; Valar Group did most of the engineering and performance work in the first release. Both teams are funded by private ZEC donations.⁠[8][8][8][9][8][8][8]

The stated rationale for Zakura was to let Zcash support global payment volumes: the announcement set the more than 50,000 transactions per second handled by Mastercard and Visa as its floor and said Valar Group was developing private information retrieval (PIR) solutions to lift wallet software beyond today’s ceiling of about one transaction per second. The next day, the Zcash Foundation welcomed Zakura while recommending that operators moving to Zakura keep a Zebra node running alongside it as an independent consensus check.⁠[8][8][9][9][9]

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; Valar Group published the code, including the voting circuits and a PIR system for nullifier non-membership proofs. As Dev Ojha explained on August 6, votes are counted by Ironwood ZEC held at the snapshot, amounts are homomorphically encrypted to a multi-party computation committee and only the final totals are decrypted, and 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.⁠[10][10][10][10][11][11][11]

Voting closed on September 14, with about 2.4 million ZEC taking part, 66% of the 3.6 million ZEC in the pool at the snapshot. Because the community panels favored starting reissuance under the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) as soon as possible while coinholders favored 2031, Shielded Labs, Project Tachyon, ZODL, the Zcash Foundation, and Valar Group agreed to adopt February 2031 as the most conservative interpretation, with the option of revisiting it in a later poll.⁠[12][12][12][12]

On August 12, 2026, Cypherpunk Technologies, a listed company whose treasury strategy is to accumulate ZEC, announced that it had appointed Valar Group founder Dev Ojha as an advisor, saying Valar Group had played a significant role in developing Zakura.⁠[13][13][13]

At the Zcash Zummit session of the Network State Conference in Singapore on October 9, 2026, Valar Group’s Evan Forbes was listed among the speakers.⁠[14][14]

Valar Group considers the biggest bottleneck to scaling Zcash to be how wallets find their own payments: today a wallet must download every transaction and test each one, so the group is building PIR-based methods for finding funds with post-quantum privacy, re-architecting wallet libraries and building servers to answer PIR queries, while also working on sync speed, quantum recoverability, and token holder voting. The roadmap on its website sets targets of 100 transactions per second with ML-KEM post-quantum encryption and about one-minute confirmations by the end of 2026, and 2,000 transactions per second with confirmations in seconds by the end of 2027.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

Valar Group: Official website: https://valargroup.dev/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Zakura: Official website: https://zakura.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ValarGroup (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/valargroup (opens in a new window)⁠[3]