A Decade-Old Crypto Veteran, Zcash Is Facing a Midlife Crisis Too

Source: TechFlow (Shenchao)

On January 7, Zcash’s entire core development team resigned.

Not one or two people in a dispute—but the whole Electric Coin Company (ECC), around 25 people in total, including the CEO, walked out together.

ECC is the primary developer behind Zcash. Put simply, the people who write the code quit.

The market reacted immediately. ZEC fell more than 20% on the news.

A quick reminder: Zcash is almost ten years old.

It launched on October 28, 2016—earlier than many people even entered crypto. Its original selling point was “privacy transactions”: sender, receiver, and amount fully encrypted, invisible on-chain.

In reality, after nine years, less than 1% of ZEC transactions actually use the privacy feature

The remaining 99% are effectively transparent.

For nine years, usage stagnated while the team kept going. The price collapsed from over USD 3,000 at launch to around USD 15 in July 2024.

Then, at the end of 2025, ZEC suddenly took off.

From hovering around USD 40 earlier in the year, it surged to USD 744 on November 7, pushing market cap above USD 10 billion and back into the top 20.

The long-dormant “privacy coin” narrative suddenly became fashionable again.

And then—the development team left.

It reads like a midlife script: buy a Porsche, then get divorced. Get the year-end bonus, then break up.

When money is scarce, everyone is a comrade. When money arrives, the fight becomes about who decides.

So what was the fight about?

A wallet called Zashi.

Zashi is a mobile wallet launched by ECC in early 2024, designed with privacy enabled by default. It is the most important user gateway in the Zcash ecosystem.

ECC wanted to privatize Zashi, bring in external capital, and turn it into a venture-backed company that could raise funds and iterate quickly.

But ECC is not an independent for-profit company.

In 2020, ECC was placed under a nonprofit entity called Bootstrap, structured as a U.S. 501(c)(3).

In simple terms: this structure is designed for charities and public-interest organizations. The upside is tax exemption. The downside is that profits cannot be distributed internally, and asset decisions are subject to board approval.

At the time, this was done for compliance—to reduce regulatory pressure from the SEC. In the bear market, nobody cared. There was no money to fight over.

Now, the Bootstrap board said no.

Their reasoning was straightforward: as a nonprofit, they have a legal obligation to protect donor interests. Privatizing Zashi could be illegal, invite lawsuits, or trigger political backlash. They pointed to OpenAI as a cautionary example—how many lawsuits followed its attempt to move from nonprofit to for-profit.

Former ECC CEO Josh Swihart strongly disagreed.

On X, he called the board’s actions “malicious governance behavior”, saying it made it “impossible for the team to perform its duties effectively and with dignity.”

He used a legal term: “constructive discharge”—meaning you’re not formally fired, but working conditions are made untenable, effectively forcing you to leave.

In this case, 25 people were forced out together.

Swihart also publicly named four board members: Zaki, Christina, Alan, and Michelle—and combined their initials into “ZCAM.”

ZCAM.

It sounds a lot like “SCAM.”

Whether intentional or not is unclear.

Among them, Zaki Manian has the most controversial history.

A long-time figure in the Cosmos ecosystem, he was a core member of Tendermint before resigning in 2020 after a public conflict with founder Jae Kwon.

In 2023, the FBI informed him that two developers in a project he oversaw were North Korean agents. He allegedly knew and did not disclose this for 16 months. In October 2024, Jae Kwon publicly accused him of gross negligenceand betraying community trust.

Today, he sits on the Zcash board.

One day after the mass resignation, the former ECC team announced a new company, code-named CashZ.

They said they would use the existing Zashi codebase to launch a new wallet within weeks. Existing Zashi users would be able to migrate seamlessly.

“We are still the same team, with the same mission: to build unstoppable private money.”

No new token. No fork. Just changing the shell and continuing the work.

The most ironic part of this story is the timing.

When ZEC was USD 15, nobody cared who controlled the wallet.

When it hit USD 500, the value of Zashi suddenly became existential.

Money clarifies relationships.

The same nonprofit-versus-startup tension played out very differently elsewhere. At OpenAI, the board lost. At Zcash, the team left.

Who “won” is unclear—but the conflict itself is common across crypto.

On the CashZ website, Swihart wrote why they left:

“The nonprofit foundation model is a relic of crypto’s compliance era. Back then, projects needed a ‘regulatory buffer’ to protect themselves. But those buffers bring bureaucracy and strategic deadlock. Startups can scale quickly. Nonprofits cannot.”

He added:

“Anyone who has spent time in crypto knows this: the entanglement between nonprofit foundations and tech startups is an endless source of drama.”

Endless drama indeed.

In 2023, when Zooko stepped down as CEO, rumors already circulated of disagreements with Swihart. In January 2025, Peter Van Valkenburgh, a board member of the Zcash Foundation, also resigned.

After ten years, most of the original figures are gone.

Someone asked on X: Will Zcash die?

The chain is still running.

The code still exists.

Only the people writing it have changed.

But Swihart is likely right: the tension between nonprofits and startups is a structural flaw in crypto governance. Cosmos fought over it. Ethereum fought over it. Solana fought over it too.

The difference is only in intensity and outcome.

Zcash chose the cleanest option of all.

Break up.

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