Former Zcash developers announced the launch of a new wallet called cashZ on January 8, 2026. This happened less than a day after their mass departure from Electric Coin Company.
According to Josh Swihart, former ECC CEO, the team that launched Zcash and created the Zashi wallet is now working on cashZ, using the same code. The new wallet is planned to launch within a few weeks. For Zashi users, a simple and quick data migration is promised.
The Team Announces Launch of CashZ Wallet Based on Zashi Code
The Zcash development team announced late on January 8 that the cashZ wallet will use the same Zashi code they developed at Electric Coin Company. Josh Swihart assured privacy coin users that the entire team remains 100% focused on full-scale development of Zcash.
The developers emphasized that they are not launching any new coins. Their goal is solely to scale Zcash through a new company structure.
Users of the existing Zashi wallet will be able to switch to cashZ without issues after its launch. The team has not yet disclosed other technical details about the new wallet. The name cashZ is being used as a working title and may change by the time of the official release.
The announcement came just hours after the team left ECC. On the new company website, Swihart wrote that scaling Zcash to billions of users requires a startup structure. According to him, startups know how to grow quickly, while nonprofit structures are not suitable for such tasks. That is why the team decided to create a new company fully focused on Zcash.
Conflict With Board and Departure of Zcash Developers
The entire Electric Coin Company development team resigned on January 7, 2026. The reason was a management conflict between the ECC team and the Bootstrap board, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that oversees the company. Josh Swihart said the team was “forced to leave while formally retaining employment.” This is a legal term meaning that working conditions became so unacceptable that quitting was the only option.
According to Swihart, most Bootstrap board members lost alignment with the Zcash mission. Among them, he named Zaaki Manian, Kristina Garman, Alan Fairless and Michelle Lai, who are referred to as ZCAM within the community. Key points of conflict were changes in working conditions and differences in vision for the project’s development between the developers and the board.
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The former CEO emphasized that working conditions were changed in such a way that conscientious and effective performance became impossible. According to him, the board’s decisions limited ECC‘s autonomy, blocked the implementation of the roadmap, and led developers to view what was happening as malicious management.
At the same time, the conflict was not an isolated incident. Project founder Zooko Wilcox left the CEO position in December 2023, after which he was replaced by Josh Swihart. In January 2025, Peter Van Valkenburgh left the Zcash Foundation board. And in December 2025, ECC announced internal reorganizations just a few weeks before the entire team left.
Why Developers Abandoned the Nonprofit Model
On the new company website, Josh Swihart named three reasons why the team decided to launch a business structure. First, Zcash originally grew out of cypherpunk ideology and, according to him, requires an organization that shares and understands these principles.
The second reason is about values and alignment. Swihart noted that privacy in crypto should be seen as the norm, just as confidentiality is with cash. The fight for such rights, in his view, is only possible in an organization able to act boldly, quickly, and without bureaucratic constraints.
The former CEO also stressed that anyone who has worked in crypto for more than a few years is familiar with the problems arising from the intertwining of nonprofit foundations and tech startups. This structural conflict between foundation management and startup flexibility has repeatedly caused prolonged crises in various crypto projects.
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The third reason is that over the past two years, Zcash has undergone a virtual rebirth and is no longer a small project. The network requires an organizational model capable of supporting growth and scaling globally.
According to Santiment, Zcash development activity dropped to its lowest levels since November 2021. The decline coincided with a price drop of about 40% over the past two months. However, from September 22 to November 16, 2025, the privacy coin’s market cap grew by about 15 times.
This growth drew attention to Zcash at the end of 2025. After the rally, the ZEC token traded around $443.82, but the price then began to fall.
