TL;DR:
Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) announced a seed funding round of $25 million, backed by some of the most influential funds in the crypto ecosystem.
The round included participation from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Chapter One and Maelstrom, Arthur Hayes’s fund. Individual investors include Balaji Srinivasan, David Friedberg and Haseeb Qureshi, among other industry figures.
ZODL was born following the mass departure of cryptographers and developers from Electric Coin Company, triggered by a conflict with Bootstrap, the company’s nonprofit board. The dispute centered on the monetization of parts of the Zcash protocol, including the Zashi wallet, developed in 2024. In January, then ECC CEO Josh Swihart confirmed that the entire team had left the firm. Swihart currently leads ZODL and took with him the engineers who designed and maintained the most critical systems of Zcash.
The startup operates the Zodl wallet, renamed from Zashi’s codebase, which has facilitated over $600 million in ZEC swaps since October. That momentum also translated into a growth of more than 400% in Zcash’s shielded pool supply, which reached a record 23% of total token supply by late 2025. Cypherpunk Technologies, which invested $5 million in this round — its first technology bet outside of ZEC — currently holds 294,743 ZEC, equivalent to 1.78% of the circulating supply.
The capital raised will be directed toward hiring engineers and the ongoing development of Zcash technologies. The network, which incorporated next-generation ZK proofs and migrated to proof of stake, was one of the best-performing digital assets in the second half of 2025, driven by strong interest in on-chain privacy.
