Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), a new development group formed by the former core team of Electric Coin Company (ECC), has raised more than $25 million in seed funding to continue building the privacy-focused cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The round drew support from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Chapter One, Balaji Srinivasan and several crypto and tech angel investors.
ZODL was founded by former ECC CEO Josh Swihart. The lab came about after ECC’s entire engineering and product team stepped down in January following a governance conflict 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 core software and tools.
One focus is Zodl, a self-sufficient mobile wallet formerly known as Zashi. The app lets users hold ZEC and send shielded transactions, which hide the sender, receiver and transaction amount using zero-knowledge cryptography.
Since launching in 2024, the wallet has helped expand activity in Zcash’s escrow pool by more than 400%, according to the project. The app has also processed over $600 million in ZEC swaps since October, according to the team behind it.
The new funding will support the hiring of engineers and expand development. ZODL says it will continue work on the Zcash protocol while building products designed to make private digital payments easier to use.
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 more than 8.8% in the past 24-hour period to now trade at $215, amid a broader rally in the crypto market that has seen the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index rise 3% over the same period.
Cypherpunk Technologies (CYPH), a digital asset finance company backed by the Winklevoss twins that focuses on ZEC, rose 2.7% in today’s trading session.
