This week the developers of the Zcash token announced a split from Bootstrap, the nonprofit entity that was established in 2020 to govern the Zcash ecosystem. Within hours of announcing the separation from Bootstrap, ECC CEO Josh Swihart announced “cashZ”. This group of developers made for the Electric Coin Company — which now plans to rebrand as a new and independent entity.
Here’s what happened
Swihart and his team had developed the Zcash token in 2016 on its own independent blockchain, which is a fork of Bitcoin’s codebase. Towards the end of 2025, the token logged a 1,500 percent growth to hit the price point of $700 after Cypherpunk Technologies announced its Zcash Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) strategy.
In his post announcing ECC’s split from Bootstrap, Swihart said the non-profit entity had moved into “misalignment” with Zcash’s mission — without sharing elaborate details.
“The terms of our employment were changed in ways that made it impossible for us to perform our duties effectively and with integrity,” he said.
In order to keep the Zcash ecosystem evolving, Swihart said, the former ECC developers will be finding a new company and continue “building unstoppable private money”.
“The Zcash protocol is unaffected. This decision is simply about protecting our team’s work from malicious governance actions that have made it impossible to honor ECC’s original mission,” he noted.
Previously, the ECC had created a privacy-focused mobile wallet called Zashi that was launched in March 2024.
The unveiling of cashZ
On January 8, Swihart announced that the cashZ wallet will soon be ready for rollout as a new initiative.
“Startups can scale, but nonprofits can’t. That’s why we created a new Zcash startup,” Swihart’s announcement said.
The new startup will not be launching any new coins, the cashZ team said.
Those interested in trying out the new wallet can join the waitlist. As per the website, over 12,700 early access signups have already been registered on the platform.
Source: cashz.com
The exact release date of cashZ remains unknown for now. As of January 9, Zcash was trading at $434 with a ten percent profit over the last day, data by CoinMarketCap showed. The token’s market cap stands at $7.16 billion and it sits atop the 17th rank on the CoinMarketCap index.