The development story of Zcash has recently taken a major turn. In early January, the management of Electric Coin Company (ECC), the core development organization of the privacy coin Zcash, announced that the entire team had left the original organizational structure. The reason was straightforward—they felt that the higher governance organization, Bootstrap, was diverging significantly and persistently from Zcash's original mission.

What exactly happened? ECC team members believed that the non-profit governance structure had become a bottleneck in terms of fundraising, incentives, and execution efficiency, limiting the project's growth potential. They wanted to explore a new approach by continuing to develop Zcash-related products as a for-profit enterprise. However, Bootstrap believed that such a transformation could pose legal and political risks, leading to an impasse between the two sides.

As disagreements grew, former ECC CEO Josh Swihart decided to go his own way. On January 9, he announced the establishment of a new for-profit startup, CashZ, aimed at focusing on Zcash wallet product development and commercialization. Their goal was ambitious—to establish a sustainable profit model and scale Zcash to hundreds of millions of users.

This split actually reflects a common contradiction in crypto projects: the tension between the cautiousness of governance organizations and the proactive drive of development teams.