The team that built Zcash’s main wallet is starting a new chapter after walking away from Electric Coin Company, the organization that has long overseen the privacy-focused project.
On January 8, former ECC CEO Josh Swihart announced that the entire Zashi wallet team has formed a new for-profit company called CashZ. It’s the same group of developers who worked on Zashi and helped push recent upgrades to the Zcash network. Their first move will be launching a new Zcash wallet, also called cashZ, built directly from the existing Zashi code.
So why did they leave ECC?
Swihart said the split came after growing conflicts with Bootstrap, the nonprofit that controls ECC. According to him, changes made by Bootstrap’s board made it harder for the team to do their work and move fast. In his words, staying inside that structure was no longer workable.
Still, he made one thing very clear: the team is not leaving Zcash.
There’s no new token coming, no side project, and no shift away from the Zcash ecosystem. The goal is the same as before—grow Zcash usage and improve the user experience—just under a different company structure.
Swihart explained that nonprofit governance can slow teams down, especially in crypto, where speed matters. Startups, he said, are simply better set up to build quickly, raise money, and stay aligned when pressure from regulators and markets increases.
Importantly, Zcash itself isn’t affected. The protocol is open source, and development will continue with the same technical direction. The change is about how the work gets done, not what’s being built.
The new cashZ wallet will feel familiar. It’s a direct continuation of Zashi, and current users will be able to move over easily once it launches. The company has already opened a public waitlist.
At first, the market didn’t take the news well. ZEC dropped briefly as rumors spread online, with some people claiming the project had been abandoned. That confusion didn’t last long. The team quickly stepped in to explain what was happening and reassure users that development is still moving forward.
This situation highlights a bigger issue in crypto. Foundations often move slowly, while startups move fast. Zcash has made real technical progress lately, but this shift shows that how a project is organized can matter just as much as the technology itself when it comes to growing and scaling.
