Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), a new development group formed by the former core team of Electric Coin Company (ECC), has raised over $25 million in seed funding to continue building the privacy-focused cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The round had support from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Chapter One, Balaji Srinivasan and several angel investors in the crypto and technology space.
ZODL was founded by former ECC CEO Josh Swihart. The lab came about after ECC’s entire engineering and product team resigned in January following a governance dispute with Bootstrap, the nonprofit board that oversees ECC. The group said the conflict made it difficult to continue its work under the previous structure.
The team has since created ZODL to continue developing Zcash’s core software and tools.
One focus is Zodl, a self-custodial mobile wallet formerly known as Zashi. The app allows users to hold ZEC and send shielded transactions, which hide the sender, recipient and transaction amount using zero-knowledge cryptography.
Since its launch in 2024, the wallet has helped increase Zcash’s protected pool activity by more than 400%, according to the project. The app has also processed more than $600 million in ZEC trades since October, according to the team behind it.
The new funding will support the hiring of engineers and expansion of development. ZODL says it will continue its work on the Zcash protocol while creating products designed to facilitate the use of private digital payments.
ECC itself remains under Bootstrap, while the engineers who built much of the network’s core software now operate through the independent ZODL lab.
The price of ZEC has risen by over 8.8% in the past 24 hours to now trade at $215, amid a broader crypto market rally that has seen the CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) rise by 3% over the same period.
Cypherpunk Technologies (CYPH), a digital asset treasury company backed by the Winklevoss twins and focused on ZEC, is up 2.7% in today’s trading session.
