Roman Akhtariev

Akhtariev was a principal engineer at Osmosis in the Cosmos ecosystem, where he fixed core scaling bottlenecks affecting all of Cosmos; his first week on the job was spent on a pain point shared by all chains, the performance of the Merkelized database.⁠[1][1]

As of October 2026, Akhtariev is a principal engineer on the team behind Zakura, a Zcash full node implementation, with Valar Group as his affiliation. Zakura is a consensus-compatible Zcash full node built for scale, led by Zcash cofounder 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 and Dev OjhaDev OjhaDev Ojha is a cryptographic engineer, an early member of the Cosmos team, and a co-founder of the decentralized exchange Osmosis; since 2026 he has led Valar Group, which focuses on Zcash protocol research and development, and co-maintains the Zcash full-node software Zakura with Sean Bowe.Open the full entry; Valar Group, led by Dev Ojha, built token holder voting for Zcash and works on making the chain post-quantum and scaling it.⁠[1][1][2][2][1]

At Zakura, he has demonstrated how private information retrieval (PIR) can speed up wallet syncing, built token holder voting together with engineer Adam Tucker, and removed the CPU bottleneck in Zakura’s sync.⁠[1][1]

Around October 8, 2026, Zakura published an engineering article by Akhtariev titled “A Privacy Layer for Transparent Wallets.” The article argues that, to guard against AI-assisted advances in cryptography, transparent addresses should expose only an address containing a hash of the public key, rotate to a fresh address on every transaction, and add a hash-based signature such as WOTS as a fallback alongside the elliptic-curve public key; private information retrieval would also hide the addresses a wallet queries from the RPC server, preventing the server from linking rotating addresses to the same user. As described in the article, the team plans for post-quantum signature opcodes to land in Zcash in January, while the transparent PIR component was to arrive in the Vizor wallet that week.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][4][4]

These opcodes would allow the Zcash network to verify hash-based signatures used to authorize payments from transparent addresses, so that a breakthrough against current wallet keys would not automatically defeat the replacement signatures. The plan covers only transparent payments, and January 2027 is a target for the code to land, not a confirmed network activation date.⁠[5][5][5][4]

Zakura: Official website: https://zakura.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]