Ten Years of Restraint, Sudden Breakup: The Non-Profit Dilemma Behind the Departure of Zcash's Core Team

Original Author: Kuli, Shenchao TechFlow

On January 7th, the core development team of Zcash collectively resigned.

It wasn't just one or two people being disgruntled; it was the entire Electric Coin Company, about 25 people, led by the CEO, all gone.

This company has an abbreviation, ECC, and is the primary developer behind Zcash. You could say, the people who write the code, quit.

As soon as the news broke, ZEC plummeted by 20%.

A well-known fact: Zcash is almost ten years old.

It launched on October 28, 2016, earlier than when many people entered the crypto space. Its selling point back then was "private transactions," where the sender, receiver, and amount were all encrypted, leaving nothing visible on-chain.

But the reality is, after nine years online, less than 1% of ZEC transactions actually use this feature.

The remaining 99% are still transacting in the open.

Nine years. The product isn't being used, and the team has been grinding away. The price fell from over $3,000 when it first launched in 2016 to $15 in July 2024.

Then, at the end of 2025, ZEC suddenly surged.

It was hovering around $40 at the beginning of the year, then soared to $744 on November 7th, with its market cap breaking $10 billion, clawing its way back into the top 20.

The narrative of privacy coins, dormant for years, suddenly became sexy again.

Great, the price rose nearly 800%, and then, "the development team ran away."

This story sounds like a middle-aged man's script. Bought a Porsche, then got divorced. Got the year-end bonus, then the team disbanded.

When there's little money, everyone is a comrade-in-arms; when there's more money, they start fighting over who calls the shots.

What are they fighting over? A wallet called Zashi.

Zashi is a mobile wallet launched by ECC in early 2024, promoting "privacy features enabled by default." It's the most important user entry point in the Zcash ecosystem.

The ECC team wanted to privatize Zashi, bring in external investment, and turn it into a startup capable of raising funds and iterating quickly.

But ECC is not an independent company. In 2020, ECC was placed under a non-profit organization called Bootstrap, structured as a US 501(c)(3).

Simply put, this structure is specifically for charities and public welfare organizations. The benefit is no taxes, the downside is that profits can't be distributed to insiders, and asset disposal must follow the board's decisions.

This was done back then for compliance, to avoid regulatory pressure from the SEC. In a bear market, no one cared about these details, as there was no money to distribute anyway.

Now, Bootstrap's board says, no.

The board's reasoning:

We are a non-profit organization with a legal obligation to protect donor interests. Privatizing Zashi could be illegal, could lead to lawsuits, could be politically attacked. They even gave an example: Look at OpenAI, trying to transition from non-profit to for-profit, how many people sued.

Former ECC CEO Josh Swihart disagrees. He said on Twitter that the board's actions constitute "malicious governance," making it "impossible for the team to perform their duties effectively and with dignity."

He used a legal term, "constructive discharge," meaning although not fired, the working conditions were altered to make the job untenable, effectively forcing them out.

25 people forced out together.

Simultaneously, Swihart named four board members: Zaki, Christina, Alan, Michelle. He connected their initials, calling them "ZCAM."

ZCAM. Sounds like SCAM. Not sure if that was intentional.

Among these four, Zaki Manian has the most history.

He's an old-timer in the Cosmos ecosystem, once a core member of Tendermint. He resigned in 2020 after a public feud with founder Jae Kwon.

In 2023, the FBI informed him that two developers in a project he was responsible for were North Korean agents. After learning this, he concealed it for 16 months before going public. In October 2024, Jae Kwon publicly accused him of "gross negligence" and "betraying the community's trust."

Now, he is a member of the Zcash board.

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 build a new wallet, launching within weeks. Existing Zashi users could migrate seamlessly.

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

No new token, no starting from scratch, just continuing under a new shell.

The most ironic part of this, in our view, is the timing.

When ZEC was $15, no one cared who managed the wallet. When it rose to $500, how much Zashi was worth became a matter of life and death.

Only when there's money do you know who's family.

Both are conflicts between non-profit organizations and startup teams. OpenAI's outcome was the board losing; Zcash's outcome is the team leaving.

Who won is unclear, but this conflict is indeed widespread in crypto projects.

Swihart wrote a passage on CashZ's website explaining why they left:

"The non-profit foundation model is a legacy of the crypto industry's compliance era. That era required projects to have 'compliance buffers' to protect themselves. But these buffers brought bureaucracy and diverging roadmaps. Startups can scale quickly; non-profits cannot."

He also said: "Anyone who's been in crypto for a few years knows that the entanglement of non-profit foundations and tech startups is a source of endless drama."

It truly is endless drama.

In 2023, when Zooko stepped down as CEO, there were rumors of disagreements between him and Swihart. In January 2025, Zcash Foundation board member Peter Van Valkenburgh also resigned.

For a ten-year-old coin, those who were supposed to leave have mostly left.

Someone asked on Twitter: Will Zcash die?

The chain is still running. The code is still there. It's just that the people writing the code have changed.

But Swihart is right; the conflict between non-profits and startups is a common ailment in this industry. Cosmos has argued. The Ethereum Foundation has argued. The Solana Foundation has argued.

The difference lies only in the manner and intensity of the arguments.

Zcash chose the cleanest way.

Disband.