Written by: Curry, TechFlow TechFow
On January 7, the core development team of Zcash resigned en masse.
It wasn't just one or two people who were upset; the entire Electric Coin Company, about 25 people, led by the CEO, all left.
This company, known by the abbreviation ECC, is the main developer behind Zcash. You can think of it as the people who wrote the code quitting.
Following the news, ZEC shares plummeted by 20%.
Here's a little-known fact: Zcash is almost ten years old.
Launched on October 28, 2016, it predates many people's entry into the crypto. Its selling point at the time was "privacy transactions," with the sender, receiver, and amount all encrypted, and nothing visible on the blockchain.
However, in reality, after nine years of operation, less than 1% of ZEC transactions actually used this feature.
The remaining 99% of people are still running around naked.
Nine years have passed, the product has no users, and the team is still struggling. The price of the coin has plummeted from over $3,000 when it was first launched in 2016 to $15 in July 2024.
Then, at the end of 2025, ZEC suddenly rose.
At the beginning of the year, it was hovering around $40, but on November 7th it surged to $744, breaking the $10 billion market capitalization mark and returning to the top 20.
The narrative of privacy coins, which had been dormant for many years, has suddenly become sexy again.
Okay, the price of the coin rose by almost 800%, and then, "the development team ran away."
This story sounds like a script for a middle-aged man. He bought a Porsche, then got divorced. He received his year-end bonus, then the relationship ended.
When money is scarce, everyone is comrade-in-arms; when money is plentiful, people start arguing about who has the final say.
What are they fighting over? A wallet named Zashi.
Zashi is a mobile wallet launched by ECC in early 2024, emphasizing "privacy features enabled by default". This is the most important user entry point in the Zcash ecosystem.
The ECC team wants to take Zashi private, bring in external investment, and turn it into a startup that can raise funds and iterate quickly.
However, the ECC is not an independent company. In 2020, the ECC was incorporated into a non-profit organization called Bootstrap, which is a U.S. 501(c)(3) structure.
Simply put, this structure is specifically designed for charities and non-profit organizations. The advantage is that they don't have to pay taxes, but the disadvantage is that they can't share profits with their own staff, and the disposal of assets is decided by the board of directors.
This was done back then to comply with regulations and avoid regulatory pressure from the SEC. In a bear market, nobody cares about these details; there's no money to be made anyway.
Now Bootstrap's board of directors says no.
The board's reasoning is as follows:
We are a non-profit organization with a legal obligation to protect the interests of our donors. Privatizing Zashi could be illegal, could lead to lawsuits, and could result in political attacks. They also gave an example: look at OpenAI, how many people sued them when they tried to switch from non-profit to for-profit?
Former ECC CEO Josh Swihart disagrees. He tweeted that the board's actions constituted "malicious governance" that prevented the team from "performing their duties effectively and with dignity."
He used a legal term called "constructive discharge," which means that although he was not fired, his working conditions were changed to the point that he could not work, which is equivalent to being forced to leave.
All 25 people were forced to leave.
At the same time, Swirat named four board members: Zaki, Christina, Alan, and Michelle. He put their initials together to form "ZCAM".
ZCAM. It sounds like SCAM. I don't know if it was intentional.
Of these four people, Zaki Manian has the most interesting story.
He is a veteran of the Cosmos ecosystem and a former core member of Tendermint. He resigned in 2020 after a public falling out with founder Jae Kwon.
In 2023, the FBI told him that two developers on a project he was in charge of were North Korean agents. He kept this a secret for 16 months before revealing it. In October 2024, Jae Kwon publicly accused him of "gross negligence" and "betraying the trust of the community."
He is now a member of the Zcash board of directors.
The day after resigning, the former ECC team announced the formation of a new company, codenamed CashZ.
They said they would use Zashi's codebase to create a new wallet, which would be launched within a few weeks. Existing Zashi users could migrate seamlessly.
"We are still the same team, with the same mission: to create an unstoppable private currency."
No new currency issued, no starting from scratch, just a different shell to continue doing the same thing.
The most ironic thing about this is the timing.
When ZEC was $15, nobody cared who was managing their wallet. When it rose to $500, the value of Zashi became a matter of life and death.
You only know who your family is when you have money.
Both OpenAI and Zcash involved conflicts between non-profit organizations and startup teams, but OpenAI ended with the board losing, while Zcash ended with the team leaving.
It's unclear who won, but this conflict is indeed prevalent in crypto projects.
Swihart wrote a statement on CashZ's official website explaining why he left:
"The nonprofit foundation model is a legacy of the era of compliance in the crypto industry. In that era, projects needed a 'compliance buffer' to protect themselves. But these buffers brought bureaucracy and divergent lines of thought. Startups could scale rapidly, but nonprofits could not."
He added, "Anyone who's been in the crypto industry for a few years knows that the entanglement between nonprofit foundations and tech startups is the source of endless drama."
It truly is an endless drama.
When Zooko stepped down as CEO in 2023, there were reports of disagreements between him and Swirart. In January 2025, Peter Van Valkenburgh, a director of the Zcash Foundation, also resigned.
This is a ten-year-old coin; most of the old ones that were going to leave have already left.
Someone on Twitter asked: Will Zcash die?
The chain is still running. The code is still there. Only the people writing the code have changed.
But Swirat is right; the conflict between nonprofits and startups is a common problem in this industry. Cosmos has argued about it. The Ethereum Foundation has argued about it. The Solana Foundation has argued about it.
The only difference is the manner and intensity of the argument.
Zcash chose the simplest approach.
They broke up.
