Overview
- Zcash Open Development Lab closed a seed round exceeding $25 million led by firms such as Paradigm, a16z Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, and Cypherpunk Technologies, with angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Haseeb Qureshi, David Friedberg, and Mert Mumtaz.
- ZEC climbed roughly 4% immediately after the news and about 9–10% over 24 hours, trading near $215–$218 according to market data cited in reports.
- ZODL was founded by Josh Swihart and formed by the former Electric Coin Company engineering and product team after a January governance dispute with Bootstrap.
- The new capital will fund hiring and continued Zcash protocol work while accelerating development of Zodl, a self‑custodial mobile wallet for private payments.
- According to the team, the Zodl wallet (formerly Zashi) helped expand Zcash’s shielded pool by more than 400% since 2024 and has processed over $600 million in ZEC swaps since October 2025.