Zaal Panthaki

Founded and run The ZAO, a community of independent artists and creators with a gated core and a wider audience across open Farcaster and Discord. Weekly governance meetings.

Lineup, venue, sponsors, press, day-of operations and livestream. Most recent: ZAOstock, 3 October 2026.

Governance, bounties and settlement on Solana, Base and Optimism. Co-founder of WaveWarZ, where artist payouts settle automatically.

Programs built around paying artists directly: battles, bounties, workshops and a free festival. Host of a long-form interview show and co-host of a weekly Ethereum show.

I do not hand-write code. I direct AI agent lanes, review what they produce and make the calls. Open-source work shipped in public. Agent systems that run drafting, publishing, bounty dashboards and fleet health, with human review on anything public.

• Organized and produced the festival, held Saturday 3 October 2026.
• A free music festival with a full lineup, livestreamed on Twitch.

Sources: zaostock.com/live; Zaal, 5 Oct 2026.

• A daily newsletter, still running.

Source: paragraph.com/@thezao.

• Ran Season 1 workshops and pitch week through early September 2026, then closed the season.
• Season 2 prep is set for late November 2026.

Source: zabalgames.com.

• Battles run on Solana mainnet with payouts settled directly to artists.
• The platform has its own developer. I own the public analytics, built by AI agent lanes I direct; organized and hosted the first in-person battle.

Source: live dashboard, as of 28 September 2026.

• Ran community bounty rounds, most recently on 1 October 2026.
• The bounty board was rebuilt from a static site into a Next.js app on 28 September 2026 by AI agent lanes I directed.

Source: github.com/bettercallzaal/poidhz.

• Weekly onchain governance (ZAO Fractal), held week after week.
• A daily newsletter published in public.
• Open-source tooling shipped in public, including the Snap-category winner at FarHack 2026 (zlank).

Sources: thezao.com; Paragraph.

Web and operations consulting for a landscape design firm in Mount Desert, Maine.

Led a $1.5M robotics project that achieved a 7x throughput gain in heavy manufacturing.