Zaki Manian is a co-founder and technical leader with 12+ years building cryptography-first systems, distributed consensus, and embedded Linux products from Mountain View. He has founded and led multiple startups and initiatives—most recently Sommelier and iqlusion—and served as Director of Tendermint Labs and Executive Director of the Trusted IoT Alliance, bridging blockchain research with production engineering. Technically fluent in C/C++, Go, Rust, Python, Haskell and real-time/embedded systems, he has shipped consensus and crypto features to high-profile open-source projects including Tendermint/CometBFT and Cosmos SDK, and contributed lints to rust-clippy. Beyond code, he advised VCs and ran a Bitcoin meetup in Mountain View, combining deep protocol intuition with product-minded thinking. An uncommon blend of low-level systems craftsmanship and crypto protocol design, he frequently surfaces practical fixes—like RPC, crypto, and build-tool improvements—that make complex distributed systems deployable.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Pinewood High School
BA History and Sociology of Science, BA History and Sociology of Science at University of Pennsylvania
A CosmosSDK application for moving assets on and off of EVM based, POW chains
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:3 reviews, 178 commits, 10 PRs in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Zaki primarily focused on updating and refactoring the codebase to use Hardhat, a development environment for Ethereum. They upgraded build tools and testing frameworks, replacing Buidler with Hardhat and modifying test utilities. The user also addressed pathing issues related to solidity artifacts and config files. Furthermore, the user added a Hardhat configuration file, suggesting an involvement in setting up the development environment.
:chains: A Framework for Building High Value Public Blockchains :sparkles:
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:1 release, 56 reviews, 73 commits in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Zaki primarily focused on refactoring and improving the codebase related to the Cosmos SDK. Their contributions include replacing dependencies like `glide` with `dep` for dependency management, which streamlines the build process and improves version control. Significant changes involved reimplementing the `bech32cosmos` integration, enhancing the interaction with account addresses. They also updated the code to use account encoding for the validator address, enhancing security.
golangcosmos-sdkblockchainchainscryptocurrency
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.