Key Takeaways
- The Electric Coin Company, the creator of Zcash, exited after a governance dispute with nonprofit overseers at Bootstrap.
- Zcash development is moving forward with a new wallet rollout despite the team departure.
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Josh Swihart, former CEO of Electric Coin Company, the company that created Zcash, announced the rollout of a new Zcash wallet on Thursday, marking the first major product move following a governance dispute that led the entire ECC team to exit its existing structure tied to Bootstrap.
Earlier this week, Swihart said ECC staff were constructively discharged after what he described as growing misalignment with members of Bootstrap’s board, which provides governance oversight as a nonprofit supporting the Zcash ecosystem.
He said changes to employment terms and governance constraints made it impossible for the team to continue operating effectively.
Following the dispute, Swihart said the former ECC team is forming a new Zcash-focused company and will continue full-stack development on Zcash under a new structure. As part of that effort, the team plans to launch a new wallet built on the existing Zashi codebase. The wallet, currently code-named cashZ, is positioned as a step toward scaling Zcash to a broader global user base.
A waitlist for the new wallet is now live, with Swihart saying existing Zashi users will be able to migrate seamlessly once the wallet launches in the coming weeks.
Swihart said the team remains fully committed to Zcash and is not launching a new token, adding that the protocol itself remains unaffected by the personnel changes. However, Zcash’s native token ZEC fell more than 20% following the ECC departure announcement before rebounding about 12% by Thursday afternoon.