The team behind the privacy-focused Zcash token is accelerating work on its new project, the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL). In a recent development, ZODL roped-in $25 million in its seed funding round. Venture capital firms including Coinbase Ventures and Paradigm among others participated in the round last week.
The ZODL team plans to continue working on advancing the Zcash ecosystem while also working on its self-custodial wallet platform, also named Zodl.
Commenting on the development, the ZODL team said, “This fundraise positions ZODL for growth, including adding engineers and other talent, and reflects strong conviction from some of the most respected investors in crypto, not only in privacy as a principle, but in the continued growth of the Zcash ecosystem and the ZODL team.”
Josh Swihart, former CEO of Electric Coin Company (ECC), founded ZODL earlier this year. In January, the core development team of Zcash, including Swihart, walked out of the ECC owing to a dispute over governance at Bootstrap, the nonprofit that parents ECC.
The same developers are now working under the ZODL branding and plan to keep Zcash’s development among its primary objectives.
a16zcrypto, Cypherpunk, Mert, and Chapter One are among investors that have poured in capital in the ZODL ecosystem.
Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan has also joined the investors as an individual backer of the project.
Over the last few months, Zcash has charted a stellar market performance. In November last year, Zcash logged a 1,500 percent growth to rise in price from $50 to over $700 — at a time when major crypto assets were registering steep losses.
The rally was fueled after Cypherpunk Technologies decided to launch a Zcash treasury strategy backed by Winklevoss Capital is among major reasons leading to the asset’s overall rally.
Winklevoss Capital has returned as an investor in the Zcash team with their ZODL initiative.