A day after the Electric Coin Company’s breakup, the team behind Zashi said it is spinning out into a new Zcash-focused company and launching a new wallet built from the existing Zashi codebase. The move is framed as an effort to “scale Zcash to billions,” while keeping the group’s work narrowly centered on the Zcash stack.
In a message signed by Josh Swihart, the developers said the new wallet is code-named “cashZ” and will reuse the codebase originally built for Zashi. The team also opened a waitlist for early access, telling existing Zashi users that “all you need to do is join the waitlist” and that a migration will be designed to feel as seamless as the current Zashi experience once cashZ is live “in a few weeks.”
The announcement attempted to answer what it expects will be the community’s first question after an organizational breakup: whether the engineers are still committed to Zcash. “The entire team that worked at Electric Coin Company and built Zashi is still 100% focused on full-stack Zcash development,” the post said. “We aren’t launching any new coins, we’re just scaling Zcash. To do that, it required that we leave and start a new Zcash-focused company.”
Why Zcash’s Core Builders Are Starting A New Company
The team said the decision to form a new company came down to three ideas: Zcash’s cypherpunk roots, governance and incentive alignment, and a need to scale.
In the longest section, the developers cast the past decade of crypto regulation as a kind of prolonged stress test for privacy, describing it as “a decade of compliance theater.” The post argued that privacy-preserving tools are not merely a technical preference but a civil-liberties issue that requires a more assertive posture from the organizations building them.
“This effort was not simply about complying with unjust laws. Of course, we must abide by the law, or else be thrown in a cage,” the message said. “But when the law is unjust, we have a moral imperative to work to change the unjust law. One tool for that is code.”
From that premise, the team connected Zcash’s mission to mainstreaming privacy online, positioning the protocol as “a peaceful global reform movement” and saying that a structure bogged down by internal friction would be poorly suited to that fight. “To do this, we need an organization that has courage,” it added, arguing for “cypherpunk leadership” and a governance model that “can’t cut through red tape.”
A second argument centered on what the post described as chronic misalignment when nonprofits and venture-style startups are intertwined. The team cited recent commentary from Andreessen Horowitz to bolster the idea that crypto’s “foundation era” is ending, while distinguishing the Zcash Foundation as an example of a standalone nonprofit that can do effective work.
The critique was not subtle: “Nonprofits are about rule-lawyering, while tech startups are about rewriting the rules,” the statement said, adding that nonprofit boards often lack the accountability mechanisms of corporate boards. The team also pointed to heightened scrutiny of US nonprofits and the risk of tax exemptions being challenged, arguing there is “no benefit in keeping a fast-growing technology company under a nonprofit when the substance of the organization is a for-profit.”
The final section placed the wallet launch inside a bigger ambition: to make Zcash large enough that privacy becomes difficult to marginalize. It framed the strategic choice as binary: “to be so small they can’t see you, or so big they can’t stop you.”
The post claimed that Zcash has undergone “a complete rebirth” over the past two years, crediting an ecosystem-wide effort and naming contributors including Sean Bowe, genzcash, and Shielded Labs, alongside “many more who prefer to remain unnamed.” That resurgence, it argued, changes the operating environment: “We are no longer so small they can’t see us. Everyone can see us. We now need to get so big they can’t stop us.”
For now, the tangible deliverable is cashZ, with the team promising more details later and signaling that execution will be the message. “Actions will speak louder than words,” Swihart wrote, urging users to join the waitlist as the developers “boot up” the new wallet and push toward what they describe as “onboarding billions to Zcash.”
At press time, the ZEC price recovered some losses from yesterday’s crash and traded at $436.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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