Ten year old coins, Zcash also has a midlife crisis On January 7th, the core development team of Zcash collectively resigned. It's not just one or two people getting upset, it's the entire Electric Coin Company, about 25 people, led by the CEO, all leaving. This company, abbreviated as ECC, is the main developer behind Zcash. You can understand it as the group of people who write code quitting. As soon as the news came out, ZEC plummeted by 20%. A hot knowledge, Zcash， I'm almost ten years old. Launched on October 28, 2016, before many people entered the cryptocurrency industry. The selling point back then was' privacy transactions', where the sender, receiver, and amount were all encrypted and nothing could be seen on the chain. But the reality is that after nine years online, less than 1% of ZEC transactions actually use this feature. The remaining 99% of people are still running naked. Nine years have passed, but no one is using the product and the team is still struggling. The coin price dropped from over $3000 when it first went online in 2016 to $15 in July 2024. Then at the end of 2025, ZEC suddenly rose. At the beginning of the year, it was still hovering around $40, but on November 7th, it surged to $744, with a market value of over 10 billion, returning to the top 20. The narrative of privacy coins, which had been dormant for many years, suddenly became sexy again. Okay, the coin price has risen by almost 800%, and then, 'the development team has run away'. This story sounds like a middle-aged man's script. I bought a Porsche and then got divorced. The year-end bonus was distributed, and then we parted ways. When money is low, we are comrades in arms. When money is high, we start to argue about who is the final say. What is the dispute about? A wallet named Zashi. Zashi is a mobile wallet released by ECC in early 2024, with the main feature of "default enabled privacy function". This is the most important user portal in the Zcash ecosystem. The ECC team wants to privatize Zashi, introduce external investment, and become a startup company that can raise funds and iterate quickly. But ECC is not an independent company. In 2020, ECC was incorporated into a non-profit organization called Bootstrap, which is a US 501 (c) (3) architecture. Simply put, this architecture is specifically designed for charitable and public welfare organizations. The advantage is that there is no need to pay taxes, but the disadvantage is that once you earn money, you cannot distribute it to your own people. The disposal of assets depends on the board of directors. I did this back then to comply with regulations and avoid regulatory pressure from the SEC. No one cares about these details in a bear market, there's no money to divide anyway. Now Bootstrap's board of directors says it's not possible. The reasons given by the board of directors are: We are a non-profit organization and have a legal obligation to protect the interests of donors. Privatizing Zashi may be illegal, subject to prosecution, or subjected to political attacks. They also gave an example: Look at OpenAI, how many people have sued it for wanting to switch from non-profit to for-profit. Josh Swihart, former CEO of ECC, doesn't see it that way. He tweeted that the board's actions were a "malicious governance behavior" that prevented the team from "effectively and with dignity fulfilling their duties". He used a legal term called 'constructive discharge', which means that although he was not fired, the working conditions were changed to be unusable, equivalent to being forced to leave. 25 people were forced to leave together. Meanwhile, Swihart named four board members: Zaki, Christina, Alan, and Michelle. He connected the initials of the four people and called them 'ZCAM'. ZCAM reads like SCAM. I don't know if it was intentional. Among these four people, Zaki Manian has the most stories. He is an elderly member of the Cosmos ecosystem and was once a core member of Tendermint. Resigned after publicly arguing with founder Jae Kwon in 2020. In 2023, the FBI told him that two developers in a project he was responsible for were North Korean agents. After he found out, he concealed it for 16 months before making it public. In October 2024, Jae Kwon publicly accused him of "serious dereliction of duty" and "betraying community trust". Now, he is a member of the Zcash board of directors. The day after resigning, the former ECC team announced the establishment of a new company, codenamed CashZ. They said they will use Zashi's code repository to create a new wallet and launch it within a few weeks. Existing Zashi users can seamlessly migrate. We are still the same team, with the same mission: to create an unstoppable private currency Not issuing new coins, not starting a new business, just changing the shell and continuing to work. We think the most ironic aspect of this is the timing. When ZEC was $15, no one cared who was in charge of the wallet. When it rises to $500, how much Zashi is worth becomes a matter of life and death. Only when you have money do you know who your family is. The conflict between non-profit organizations and entrepreneurial teams is the same. OpenAI's outcome is that the board loses, while Zcash's outcome is that the team leaves. I don't know who won, but this contradiction does exist widely in encryption projects. Swihart wrote a paragraph on CashZ's official website explaining why he left: The non-profit foundation model is a legacy of the compliance era in the cryptocurrency industry. In that era, projects needed 'compliance buffers' to protect themselves. However, these buffers brought bureaucracy and divergent paths. Startup companies could expand rapidly, but non-profit organizations could not He also said, 'People who have been in the cryptocurrency industry for a few years know that the entanglement between non-profit foundations and technology startups is the source of endless drama.'. '' It is indeed an endless drama. When Zooko stepped down as CEO in 2023, there were rumors that he had disagreements with Swihart. In January 2025, Peter Van Valkenburgh, a director of Zcash Foundation, also resigned. Ten years old coins, almost everything that needs to be left is gone. Someone asked on Twitter: Will Zcash die? The chain is still running. The code is still there. Just a new batch of code writers. But Swihart is right, the conflict between non-profit and startup companies is a common problem in this industry. Cosmos has argued before. The Ethereum Foundation has argued. The Solana Foundation has also argued. The only difference is the way and intensity of the noise. Zcash chose the most straightforward way. Break up.