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Zaki Manian

Head of Engineering & Member of the Board of Directors, Sovright

@zmanian LinkedIn

Zaki Manian is a veteran cryptographic infrastructure builder and a long-time contributor to the Zcash ecosystem. He leads engineering at Sovright, drawing on deep experience across consensus mechanisms, validator operations, and privacy-preserving protocol design. Largely self-taught, he learned cryptography on his own well before it became a career, and his conviction about privacy runs back further still, to years spent organizing against mass surveillance.

That conviction took an organized form in 2013, when he helped lead Restore the Fourth, a grassroots anti-surveillance group formed after the Snowden revelations. By 2018 he had co-founded iqlusion and joined the founding team behind Cosmos. As Director of Tendermint Labs, he helped launch the network's first public testnet and drove Inter-Blockchain Communication, the protocol that lets independent chains move value without a central intermediary.

He co-founded the decentralized finance protocol Sommelier around the same time, and he has been a contributor to Zcash since its early years, drawn to a network built to make financial privacy a core property rather than a feature added on later. A consistent instinct runs through the work. He studies how a proven network like Bitcoin solved a hard problem, then asks why another ecosystem could not hold itself to the same standard.

Since joining Sovright, Zaki has been the technical force behind much of what the organization ships, turning research-grade cryptography into systems people can actually rely on. It’s the same work he has done his whole career, putting people's money, data, and choices in their own hands rather than under external control.

Areas of expertise

Protocol engineering, blockchain interoperability, applied cryptography, and privacy infrastructure.

Track record

  • Sovright: Head of Engineering (2026–present)
  • Sommelier Protocol: Co-founder (2021–present)
  • iqlusion: Co-founder (2018–present)
  • Tendermint (All In Bits): Director of Tendermint Labs (2018–2021)
  • Trusted IoT Alliance: Executive Director (2017–2020)
  • Skuchain: Founder (2014–2017)
  • Zcash: Contributor (2016–present)
  • Restore the Fourth: Board member and San Francisco chapter lead (2013–present)
  • Education: BA, the history of science, University of Pennsylvania

Featured appearances and writing