Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), a new development group founded by the former core team of Electric Coin Company (ECC), has raised over $25 million in seed funding to continue building a privacy-focused cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The round attracted 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 comes 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 had made it difficult to continue operating under the previous structure.
The team then created ZODL to continue developing the core Zcash software and tools.
One of the focuses is Zodl, a self-custodial mobile wallet formerly known as Zashi. The app allows users to hold $ZEC Submit a shielded transaction. This uses zero-knowledge encryption to hide the sender, recipient, and transaction amount.
Since its launch in 2024, the wallet has helped Zcash expand its sealed pool activity by more than 400%, according to the project. This app has also processed over $600 million $ZEC According to the team behind it, the exchange will begin in October.
The new funding will support expanded engineering hiring and development. ZODL said it will continue to develop the Zcash protocol while developing products designed to make private digital payments easier to use.
While ECC itself remains under bootstrap, the engineers who built much of the network’s core software now work through the independent ZODL Lab.
price of $ZEC It is currently trading at $215, up over 8.8% in the past 24 hours amid a broad recovery in the crypto market, with the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index up 3% over the same period.
Cypherpunk Technologies (CYPH) is a digital asset treasury company backed by the Winklevoss twins. $ZECup 2.7% in today’s trading.
