Zcash Plunges 20% After Entire Core Team Exits Amid Dispute

Zcash (ZEC) fell by as much as 20% over the past 24 hours after the entire team at the Electric Coin Company (ECC) announced it was leaving following a governance dispute tied to a nonprofit that supports the project.

The token is currently trading near $420, down about 13% on the day after a mild rebound in the past hour, according to CoinGecko.

Josh Swihart, the now-former CEO of ECC, said Wednesday in a post on X that the team was “constructively discharged” after a majority of the Bootstrap board changed employment terms. He said the changes made it impossible for the team to carry out its work “effectively and with integrity.”

Bootstrap is a nonprofit created to support Zcash and govern ECC. Swihart said the board members involved included Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai, who collectively are referred to as ZCAM.

Swihart said that the Zcash protocol itself was not affected by the dispute. He added that the departing team plans to form a new company and continue working on privacy-focused technology outside of ECC.

‘We're founding a new company, but we're still the same team with the same mission: building unstoppable private money,” he wrote.

Zcash founder and former ECC CEO Zooko Wilcox also chimed in, stressing that none of the “drama” involves him or Shielded Labs. He added that he believes Alan Fairless, Zaki Manian, and Christina Garman “to be people of exceptionally high integrity.”

The governance dispute follows a standout year for Zcash. ZEC was the top-performing large-cap cryptocurrency of 2025, rising more than 800%. The rally came as interest in privacy-focused tokens surged, The Defiant previously reported. This trend is expected to continue, according to a new report by a16z Crypto, which called privacy “the most important moat in crypto this year.”