Tom Howard

Howard says he started out in computer science before moving into entrepreneurship, and has been building and investing as a venture capitalist in crypto since around 2017; as a seed investor he has overseen about 300 investments across various layer-1 chains and the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana ecosystems. He was a founding member of MetaCartel DAO, a fork of MolochDAO, and of VentureDAO, the first for-profit MolochDAO, and an early participant in Ethereum governance DAOs including Compound, AaveAaveAave is a decentralized, non-custodial lending protocol deployed on Ethereum and several other public blockchains, where users can deposit crypto assets into liquidity pools to earn interest or borrow on an overcollateralized basis. The protocol is governed by the Aave DAO, made up of AAVE token holders.Open the full entry, UMA, Synthetix, and Maker.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In April 2019, Howard wrote that no cryptocurrency had truly delivered on Bitcoin’s promise of a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” and that this had led him to step back from the Taureon angel group and return to startup building, joining Rossco Paddison, who had trained more than 7,500 people to use a Bitcoin wallet, to launch the wallet Mosendo. Mosendo was designed as a non-custodial wallet denominated in the fiat currency users think in, using DAI for U.S. dollars and Synthetix synthetic assets for other fiat currencies, with fiat access through services such as Wyre. He later wrote that the company, too early, shut down because of a lack of runway rather than a lack of users.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][1]

Howard says he founded the crypto options exchange PowerTrade, which was backed by firms including Framework, Nascent, and CMS. In December 2021, PowerTrade launched Power Pro, a decentralized derivatives protocol operated by a DAO governed by holders of the PTF token; Howard, then its business development and growth officer, said derivatives are the best tool for hedging crypto volatility and should be made accessible to everyone in a decentralized way. That month he also wrote about why DeFi options had not taken off like spot and perpetual products, estimating the addressable market for crypto options at $12 trillion in annual trading volume and describing PowerTrade’s multi-collateral margining and DAO liquidation reserve mechanisms.⁠[1][3][3][3][3][4][4][4][4]

In January 2023, Howard set out the purpose of his Substack “network0”: giving everyone the option to “exit” to a self-sovereign system when the system they are in works against them. He hosted “Building the Network State” meetups in New York, Vietnam, Colombia, and Singapore and wrote an explainer of the network state concept in response to the common objection that network states could not withstand states with bigger guns.⁠[5][6][7][7][7][1]

In March 2025, Howard wrote that the U.S. stablecoin bill as then drafted would effectively shut Tether out of the U.S. market, calling this a major policy error because offshore dollar stablecoins strengthen the dollar’s international standing. As of November 2025 he was head of strategy at CoinList, a crypto token sale platform, and said he occasionally worked with political groups to promote pro-crypto and pro-privacy policies in the U.S. government.⁠[1][8][8]

From 2025, Howard became a public advocate for Zcash, hosting Zcash events in May and June of that year, the May event a rooftop gathering co-hosted with Sovereign House in New York; he also onboarded crypto natives to the ZashiZodlZodl 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 wallet and pitched ZEC to crypto funds and institutional investors. He regards Zcash as the self-sovereign store of value that Satoshi envisioned but never completed and ZEC as the natural successor to Bitcoin as money; he leans against proof of stake and formal on-chain voting on consensus changes, and argues for scaling as soon as possible and supporting Tachyon.⁠[1][1][1][9][9][9][1][1][1][1][1]

On November 21, 2025, Howard announced his candidacy for the Zcash Community Grants committee (ZCG) on a platform of “ZEC maximalism and tax efficiency.” Calling the Zcash dev reward a “tax,” he argued for stronger accountability for grantees and for prioritizing token holder voting on the dev reward, and said his ultimate goal was to replace ZCG with on-chain token holder votes and delegates. In his candidacy post he disclosed that he then had no formal role or economic interest in any Zcash-related organization but held ZEC. The election had 17 candidates, with three seats filled by approval voting among members of the Zcash Community Advisory Panel; Zerodartz, Artkor, and Hanh were elected.⁠[1][1][1][1][10][10][10][10][10]

In August 2026, Howard posted the launch announcement of Zcash Labs on the Zcash Community Forum: an independent organization providing Zcash blockchain integrations to businesses and institutions, operating infrastructure, and funding new projects under a model of advancing costs itself and then seeking reimbursement plus a 20% markup through the coinholder retroactive grants program. He explained that the role combines technical project management, administration, and VC-style financial underwriting, and that Zcash Labs had made small grants of 5 to 10 ZEC to startup teams without taking equity. On August 14 he applied for a $6,000 retroactive grant for its first project, zcashto.cash, saying the vote would be read as coinholders’ view of the model; the application was approved on September 29.⁠[11][12][11][11][11][13][13][14]

In September, Zcash Labs signed an agreement with hardware wallet maker Ledger to provide $80,000 for adapting Ledger’s Zcash integration to Ironwood. When a community member raised the issue of grantees voting on their own grants, Howard replied that coinholders would sell ZEC and harm themselves if grants were perceived as corrupt, so what matters is whether grants are good for Zcash and reasonably priced, not how much ZEC a grantee holds.⁠[15][15][11][11][11]

After the NU7 coinholder vote closed in September 2026, with the community panels favoring starting reissuance under the Network Sustainability Mechanism as soon as possible and coinholders choosing 2031, Howard pointed out that the split left reissuance with effectively no start date, calling it a design flaw in the voting system. When 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, 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, ZODL, the Zcash Foundation, and 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 then agreed on February 2031, he welcomed the decision.⁠[16][16][16][16]

At the Zcash Zummit session of the Network State Conference in Singapore on October 9, 2026, Howard was listed among the speakers as a member of Zcash Labs.⁠[17][17]

Zcash Labs: Official website: https://zcashlabs.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

network0 (personal Substack): https://network0.space/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]

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

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thowar2/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]