The development team that left Electric Coin in January to launch Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) has raised over $25 million from the likes of a16z Crypto and Coinbase Ventures to continue building Zodl’s privacy-focused and self-managed wallet.
ZODL was founded by former ECC CEO Josh Swihart and includes the entire engineering and product team that previously worked on ECC’s Zodl wallet. They resigned due to disputes with Bootstrap, the non-profit organization that oversees ECC, over how Zcash should work as a privacy protocol.
Crypto-focused investment firms Paradigm, Winklevoss Capital, Cypherpunk Technologies, Maelstrom and Chapter One were among the other participants in the $25 million funding round, ZODL said in an X message on Monday.
Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Silicon Valley investor David Friedberg and Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi also contributed.
ZODL said the widespread support “reflects the strong belief of some of the most influential crypto investors, not only in privacy as a principle, but also in the continued growth of the Zcash ecosystem”, adding that it will use the funds to expand its engineering team.
The Zodl open wallet is one of the core infrastructures of the Zcash ecosystem.
The Zodl wallet was originally launched by ECC under Swihart as Zashi, before ZODL changed it to the Zodl wallet in February.
Zcash is up almost 10% in 24 hours
Zcash (ZEC) was one of the top privacy tokens last year, rising nearly tenfold from $55.86 to $527.84 amid renewed interest in privacy-focused protocols.
Data from CoinGecko shows that while ZEC has been affected by the broader crypto market rebound for the start of 2026, it has risen 4.1% to $217.80 on news of the latest funding round.
related to: A US Treasury report notes legitimate privacy uses for cryptographic mixers
ZODL said that the Zodl wallet has facilitated more than $600 million in ZEC swaps since October 2025, while noting that the protected Zcash pool has grown by more than 400% since its launch in 2024.
Zcash’s protected pool is a key feature of the protocol to scramble transactions so that sender, receiver and amount details remain hidden and untraceable.
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