Builders behind popular Zcash wallet Zashi to launch new startup 'cashZ'

The former Electric Coin Company team is moving quickly to reframe Thursday's Zcash governance clash as a startup pivot rather than a breakup.

Josh Swihart, who led Electric Coin Company, said the group is launching a new Zcash startup and will ship a new wallet built from the Zashi codebase, with the working name “cashZ.”

In a post on X, Swihart said the goal is to “scale Zcash to billions of users,” arguing that “startups can scale, but nonprofits can’t,” and positioning the new entity as the fastest path to build consumer products without being slowed by nonprofit governance.

The announcement follows Thursday’s dispute with Bootstrap, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit created to support Zcash and oversee ECC’s work, as CoinDesk reported.

The conflict centered on control and restructuring options around Zashi, with ECC’s leadership saying the team was “constructively discharged." Bootstrap argued that nonprofit legal and fiduciary constraints limited what it could approve.

Swihart stressed that the Zcash protocol itself was fully unaffected, and that the same engineers will continue building on the network under a new corporate structure.

ZEC had slid sharply after the initial announcement of the split, with volatility spilling into the broader privacy coin complex.

For now, the new wallet effort is likely to be watched as the clearest indicator of whether the shake-up accelerates shipping new products or simply adds another layer of fragmentation to an already small ecosystem.