Ash Zamani
Founder & CEO at Optimex
Greater Seattle Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAsh Zamani is a fintech and crypto entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Optimex, with 13 years of experience building Bitcoin-native, self-custodial finance infrastructure that bridges DeFi, stablecoins, and traditional markets. Previously he led cryptography and digital currency research at Visa, designing tokenization and CBDC architectures and contributing to widely cited protocols like Zether, FlyClient, and RapidChain. His work blends rigorous academic training (PhD and Yale postdoc) with product-grade engineering, having driven designs adopted by major institutions including JP Morgan and the Ethereum Foundation. As an advisor he has shaped threshold signing and novel consensus ideas (Proof-of-Intelligence) for emergent AI-blockchain stacks, reflecting a focus on privacy-preserving cryptography and incentive-aligned protocols. Based in the Greater Seattle Area, he combines deep research credibility—10K+ academic citations across team outputs—with hands-on startup execution and institutional partnerships. Notably, his teams have consistently delivered high-volume, institutional-grade products (>$3B monthly volume) without relying on wrapping, bridges, or centralized custody.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Amirkabir University of TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at The University of New MexicoPostdoc, Computer Science, Postdoc, Computer Science at Yale University
English, Persian
Github Skills (18)
authority9
randomized-algorithm9
trust9
protocols8
cryptography7
intellij-platform6
intellij-plugin6
distributed-systems6
intellij6
scalable5
probability4
go-language4
c-library3
tor3
ide3
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
mahdiz/secbib
Dec 2017 - Nov 2018
Contributions:36 commits, 28 pushes, 1 branch in 11 months
mahdiz/mpclib
Apr 2014 - Aug 2015
Contributions:15 commits, 17 pushes in 1 year 4 months
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