Zcash Outpaces Bitcoin Gains as Key Development Team Raises $25 Million

Privacy coin Zcash is one of the biggest crypto gainers over the past day, rising 7% and outpacing Bitcoin’s own rebound as a key team of core developers just raised a Series A round of funding for their fresh venture. Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) said Monday that it has raised over $25 million in funding from a prominent group of investors including Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Zcash treasury firm Cypherpunk Technologies, and notable angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Haseeb Qureshi, and Mert Mumtaz. Founded by Josh Swihart, former CEO of Electric Coin Company (ECC), ZODL continues the work begun at ECC, including development of the Zodl wallet (formerly Zashi). Since launching in 2024, the wallet has grown Zcash’s shielded pool by over 400%, according to the team, and processed more than $600 million in ZEC swaps since October 2025.

The full ECC team departed that company in January and has since migrated to ZODL to continue building the wallet as an open, self-custodial private financial platform aimed at broader ecosystem interoperability.  Beyond the wallet, ZODL said that it maintains a strong focus on Zcash protocol development. The engineers responsible for Zcash’s core systems at ECC have joined ZODL and continue that work, prioritizing usability-driven technical progress. “This fundraise positions ZODL for growth, including adding engineers and other talent, and reflects strong conviction from some of the most respected investors in crypto, not only in privacy as a principle, but in the continued growth of the Zcash ecosystem and the ZODL team,” ZODL said in a statement.

Launched in 2016 in a process that included input from noted whistleblower Edward Snowden, Zcash is designed to be more private than cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, making it more difficult to trace transactions on its blockchain. The coin saw a resurgence in investor interest last fall, rising from a price of about $50 in September to a multi-year peak of nearly $700 in November. That’s still shy of Zcash’s all-time high mark of $3,191 set soon after launch in 2016. Like most leading cryptocurrencies, the price of Zcash (ZEC) has fallen sharply in recent months, with the coin recently trading for $215. It’s up 7% over the last day, outpacing Bitcoin’s own nearly 3% rise to just over $69,000. Even with the daily rise, ZEC remains down about 11% over the last month.