Josh Swihart's Zcash Open Development Lab raises $25 million in seed funding

Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), a new development group formed by the former core team of the 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 angel investors in crypto and technology.

ZODL was founded by former ECC CEO Josh Swihart. The lab emerged after the entire ECC engineering and product team resigned in January following a governance dispute 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 core Zcash software and tools.

One focus is Zodl, a self-custodial mobile wallet previously known as Zashi. The app lets users hold $ZEC and send shielded transactions, which hide sender, receiver and transaction amount using zero-knowledge cryptography.

Since its launch in 2024, the wallet has helped expand activity in Zcash’s shielded 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 hiring engineers and expanding 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 is up more than 8.8% in the last 24-hour period to now trade at $215, amid a wider crypto market recovery that has seen the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index move up 3% in the same period.

Cypherpunk Technologies (CYPH), a digital asset treasury firm backed by the Winklevoss twins that’s focusing on $ZEC, is up 2.7% in today’s trading session.