Who Runs Zcash? Governance, ECC, the Zcash Foundation and ZODL Explained

Unlike a corporate-issued token, no single company owns or controls Zcash — the protocol itself is open source, and changes require broad agreement across independent organizations and the wider community. Here's who's involved.

Electric Coin Company (ECC)

Electric Coin Company was the original company, founded by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, that built and launched Zcash in October 2016. For years, ECC was the primary engineering team behind the protocol and shipped key software including the original zcashd node and, later, the Zashi mobile wallet.

Zcash Foundation

The Zcash Foundation is an independent, member-directed nonprofit founded in 2017 to steward the protocol and advocate for financial privacy — deliberately separate from ECC's corporate structure, to avoid protocol decisions resting with a single for-profit entity.

Zcash Improvement Proposals (ZIPs)

Protocol changes are proposed publicly as ZIPs (Zcash Improvement Proposals), discussed by the community and developer teams, and — for major changes — put to a vote among ZEC holders before a network upgrade activates at a set block height. The 2026 NU7 vote (covered in our history of Zcash) is a recent example of this process in action.

The 2026 governance dispute

In January 2026, ECC's entire engineering and product team resigned after a dispute with Bootstrap, the nonprofit board overseeing ECC, over the direction of the company — reportedly including disagreement over how much ECC should be able to commercialize products like its Zashi wallet to compete and raise outside capital.

The departing team founded Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), which raised over $25 million in seed funding from investors including Paradigm and a16z, and took over development of what had been the Zashi wallet — since rebranded to Zodl.

For the full account, see CoinDesk's reporting on the split and CoinDesk's coverage of ZODL's funding round.

What this means in practice

Zcash development today is more distributed across independent teams than it was before 2026 — the Zcash Foundation, ZODL, and other ecosystem contributors — rather than concentrated in one company. For a user, the practical effect is mostly about which team ships which piece of software (for example, the Zodl wallet is now maintained by ZODL rather than ECC) — the underlying protocol, its 21 million max supply, and its open-source, ZIP-based upgrade process are unchanged.

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This is a fast-moving story. If something here is out of date, tell us in the @ZecZcash Telegram channel and we'll fix it.