Evan Forbes

Forbes was one of the founding engineers of the modular blockchain Celestia and later led its consensus team. At Celestia he developed a block propagation protocol capable of sustaining multiple gigabits per second of throughput and helped design Fibre, a partially replicated data availability protocol targeting more than one terabit per second.⁠[1][2][1][1]

In July 2022, the Celestia Labs team traveled to Paris for ETHCC week; Forbes, then a Celestia core developer, gave a talk at ETHCC on July 19 titled “Celestiums: Scaling Ethereum Rollups by using Celestia for Data Availability,” and on July 22 spoke at the Nebular Summit on what can be done with ABCI++.⁠[3][3][3][3]

On May 4, 2026, Forbes and Dev Ojha, on behalf of Valar Group, published a test report on the Zcash Community Forum examining stale-block and reorganization risk when a proof-of-work chain shortens its block time. On 100 Zebra nodes spread across 19 regions and multiple cloud providers, they measured block propagation delay, block times, stale heights, and reorg rates at a 25-second target interval, and built a theoretical model for estimating the stale rate to compare with the measurements.⁠[4][4][4][4]

The test results were that, with properly configured TCP connections, both the expected stale-block rate and the observed share of stale heights were below 5%, roughly in line with Ethereum’s proof-of-work mainnet at 12.5-second blocks; the conclusion was that the NU7 upgrade could reduce the target block spacing to 25 seconds provided a large portion of the network adjusted its TCP configuration. When a community member raised questions about the test nodes’ connection speeds and hardware being higher than those of real-world nodes, Forbes replied that the gossip protocol has inherent load-balancing properties: a node must download a block before it can relay it, so slower nodes contribute less to propagation.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

On July 15, 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 released the Zcash full node Zakura, where Forbes is a principal engineer focused on consensus scaling and next-generation peer-to-peer networking and built a new QUIC-based peer-to-peer stack for Zakura. Zakura’s first release included an experimental peer-to-peer transport layer, off by default, aiming for worst-case block propagation under 500 milliseconds.⁠[5][2][2][2][5][5]

The NU7 coinholder vote held in August and September 2026 asked, as its fourth question, whether to reduce the target block spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds and introduce per-pool action limits under ZIP-218; in the results published on September 14, coinholders backed shorter block times.⁠[6][7][7]

On October 9, 2026, the Network State Conference was held in Singapore, and Forbes was listed as a member of Valar Group among the speakers at the opening Zcash Zummit session.⁠[8][8]

Valar Group: Official website: https://valargroup.dev/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/evansforbes (opens in a new window)⁠[1][10]