Cryptographers who mass exited Electric Coin Company debut new Zcash wallet

The researchers and developers who mass-exited the Electric Coin Company are building a new Zcash wallet, under the "codename" cashz, to compete with the privacy network's flagship wallet Zashi.

"After you've joined the waitlist, just sit tight for a few weeks while we boot up cashZ. Once it's live, we’ll make sure the migration for every Zashi user is as easy as what you experience in Zashi today."

In a post on the new cashz website, ex-CEO of the Electric Coin Company Josh Swihart noted that cashz is being developed using "the same Zashi codebase we built."

On Thursday, Swihart announced that the entire staff of the for-profit ECC resigned en masse following a disagreement with Bootstrap, the company’s nonprofit board. While exact details remain unclear, a core dispute revolved around monetizing parts of the Zcash protocol, including, potentially, the Zashi wallet. It appears the board resisted "alternative structures to privatize Zashi" on legal, political, and corporate concerns, according to a message from Bootstrap.

In his post, Swihart notes that the nonprofit foundation model for crypto development is an outdated legacy from an era of pre-Trump regulatory uncertainty. But these "compliance" buffers have led to "bureaucratic lethargy" and misalignment. 

"The reason the mixture of nonprofits and tech startups doesn't work is at its root about misalignment. Nonprofits are about rule-lawyering, while tech startups are about rewriting the rules," Swihart wrote, arguing that profit incentives drive innovation.

"Basically, there's no benefit in keeping a fast-growing technology company under a nonprofit when the substance of the organization is a for-profit, and there might be real downside," he added.

Bootstrap is distinct from the nonprofit Zcash Foundation. The parent nonprofit was created in 2020 specifically to take ownership of the Electric Coin Company.

The news comes amid a period of rekindled interest in privacy tech broadly and Zcash in particular, which was one of the top-performing digital assets in the second half of 2025. Launched in 2016 as a fork of Bitcoin and highly refined since, Zcash was developed by some of the world's most preeminent cryptographers.

Zcash's ZEC token sold off sharply on Thursday following the ECC crew news, while rival Monero reclaimed its top spot as the largest privacy coin by market capitalization.