What Happens to Zcash Now? Developers Leave in Governance Dispute

ZEC market snapshot after the ECC team exit

ZEC was down about 9.9% over the past 30 days to around $406, with roughly $746 million in 24-hour volume and about $6.8 billion in market cap.

Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that supports both transparent and shielded transactions, with shielded transfers designed to hide details like the sender, receiver, and amount, according to the Zcash project website.

What the ECC team said about Bootstrap and the resignations

Swihart alleged in a post on X that the entire ECC team left after what he called a constructive discharge, and said the Zcash protocol was unaffected, while naming Bootstrap board members he said were responsible for governance actions at ECC.

Swihart said more details would follow. A separate site, cashz.org, is presenting information about cashZ, described on the site as a new Zcash wallet effort.

In a separate statement published on Jan. 8, the Zcash Foundation stressed that Zcash is a decentralized, open-source protocol and said no single team controls the network, adding that blocks and transactions continued to process normally.

Bootstrap’s role in ECC governance has been public for years. In a July 2024 post, ECC described Bootstrap as its parent organization and said its board included Alan Fairless, Christina Garman, and Zaki Manian at the time, according to the company’s blog.

Taken together, the public statements point to a split between an operating team and the entity that governs its employment, a structure that can be confusing in crypto where contributors often sit across nonprofits, companies, and open-source repos at the same time.

The immediate risk for Zcash users is less about whether blocks keep arriving and more about coordination. Protocol upgrades, wallet releases, and long-term funding plans tend to rely on the same small set of specialized engineers, reviewers, and community processes, even when the underlying code is open source.

Next catalysts for Zcash: governance updates and the CLARITY Act

On the facts disclosed so far, the resignations do not change Zcash’s consensus rules by themselves. The market impact comes from uncertainty around who funds future work, who maintains key components, and how disagreements are resolved when different teams claim the same mission.

Swihart said the departing team is founding a new company and will share more details later, while Zcash Foundation framed the moment as a test of decentralization rather than a single point of failure. The identity of the new company, its funding sources, and its relationship with existing Zcash ecosystem entities were not immediately clear from the public statements.

Another near-term variable is policy. Privacy coins often trade with an extra layer of regulatory risk, so investors are also tracking U.S. market-structure debates such as the CLARITY Act and broader election-year enforcement signals, a theme we track in our U.S. crypto regulation outlook for 2026.

For now, the concrete watch list is narrow: a clearer statement from Bootstrap’s leadership or board, any follow-up from Zcash Foundation on governance and funding, and a more detailed roadmap from the departing ECC team that shows what code, products, and maintenance work it plans to carry forward.