Zcash Open Development Lab, a company founded by the group formerly known as Electric Coin, has raised more than $25 million from a list of heavy crypto investors, including a16z, Paradigm, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Maelstrom (family office of Arthurshi, David Kurse). Mert, Balaji and others.
What this means for Zcash
The round comes just a few months after the ECC team reunited under a new name, giving the Zcash-focused builder fresh capital to expand its wallet and protocol operation without relying on network development funding.
Josh Swihart, who now leads ZODL after previously serving as CEO of ECC, called the rise a bet on product traction rather than a brand reset. “The name is new, but our team has been building Zcash for decades,” he wrote. “A few years ago, my team and I decided to change the trajectory of Zcash with an unrelenting focus on the user experience for secured ZEC. We released Zodl (then called Zashi) and have never looked back.”
This pitch is backed up by a number of numbers that the team clearly wants the market to notice. According to ZODL, its wallet has helped the adoption of the protected Zcash pool increase by more than 400% since launch, while facilitating more than $600 million in ZEC swaps since October 2025. Swihart said the company first rolled out what he called a “standard wallet” and then added Flexa, cold storage and Keystones to integrate with retail spending. NEAR-strength intentions for ZEC swaps.
The capital increase is also intended to change the way this work is financed. “This funding allows us to realize these ambitions without relying on grants from the Zcash Dev Fund to get there,” said Swihart. Along with Zodl, the company said it is building a complete Zallet wallet that will serve as the basis for the new desktop software, with the long-term goal of creating a “private and decentralized financial system as an alternative to legacy institutions.”
ZODL’s own announcement relied on continuity. The company said the full ECC team, including engineers responsible for the design and maintenance of some of Zcash’s core systems, was brought on board earlier this year. It added that the development of the protocol remains the focus of the company’s work, but stated that future updates should depend on the viability and market suitability of the product, not on the protocol design in isolation.
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox hailed the growth as something bigger than venture funding. “Twenty-five million dollars is a huge investment! For a company that makes wallets!?” he wrote in response to this news. “This set of investors is a signal. They are large, sophisticated, long-term and reputable.”
He focused on what the deal did not offer. He noted that there are no new tokens for investors and there is no control over the Zcash protocol. “There is no new sign that investors can cut it! ZEC supply is capped at a minimum total supply of 21M, just like Bitcoin,” Wilcox wrote. “Investors do not control the protocol! Zcash is permissionless, open source, and has a large number and diversity of stakeholders.”
From there, Wilcox developed a theory of the cycle: investors may see the wallet business as a cash flow point, but more importantly, some may be underwriting the wider adoption of ZEC itself. He pointed to a public disclosure from Cypherpunk Technologies, which he said already holds more than 1% of ZEC’s final supply, and argued that its stake in ZODL is smaller than its influence on the coin.
His conclusion was straightforward. “These people are betting that Zcash, not crypto, not privacy, not Bitcoin, not zero-proof – Zcash will be very important to our civilization,” he said.
At press time, Zcash was trading at $221.95.
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