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- ECC’s full Zcash dev team exited after a governance dispute with Bootstrap’s board; Josh Swihart cited “constructive discharge.”
- The departing team plans to form a new company, while Swihart and Zooko Wilcox said the open-source Zcash protocol stays operational.
The core development team at Electric Coin Company (ECC), a long-running contributor to the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash, has left the firm following a governance dispute with Bootstrap, the nonprofit that supports the project. ECC chief executive Josh Swihart said the full team departed after changes to employment terms left them unable to carry out their work “effectively and with integrity.”
Swihart said the disagreement centered on what he described as a “misalignment” between several Bootstrap board members and Zcash’s mission. He named Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai, often referenced as “ZCAM,” in his public statement.
Over the past few weeks, it’s become clear that the majority of Bootstrap board members (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit created to support Zcash by governing the Electric Coin Company), specifically Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai (ZCAM), have moved into…
— Josh Swihart 🛡 (@jswihart) January 7, 2026
According to Swihart, the team was not formally dismissed. Instead, he described the situation as “constructive discharge,” a term used when job terms change to the point that staff cannot reasonably continue in their roles. He said those changes prevented the team from performing duties as intended under ECC’s mandate.
Swihart said the developers intend to continue their work by founding a new company. He said the team’s objective remains “building unstoppable private money,” while separating their work from governance actions they opposed.
Zcash Protocol Remains Open-Source and Operational
Both Swihart and former ECC chief executive Zooko Wilcox said the Zcash network continues to function normally because the protocol is open-source and permissionless. They pointed to the public codebase and the ability for independent contributors to run nodes, maintain forks, and submit changes without needing a single controlling entity.
Wilcox also defended the Bootstrap board members named in Swihart’s statement, saying he considered them people of high integrity based on years of collaboration. He added that users could continue to rely on Zcash’s security and privacy features regardless of the organizational dispute.
Bootstrap is described in Swihart’s statement as a nonprofit created to support Zcash through governance. As the dispute became public, discussion threads about the departure spread through community channels, focusing on how development work, decision-making processes, and funding coordination will be handled.
CNF previously reported that a trader unshielded over 200,000 ZEC in the first days of 2026, based on Arkham Intelligence data. The report said the withdrawal equaled about 1.2% of the circulating supply and pushed shielded pool holdings down to around 4.86 million ZEC.
Zcash price traded lower during the news cycle, dipping about 13% over the past 24 hours to $424 at press time. Analysts noted that the ZEC token price remained in a downward channel on shorter time frames, with potential for additional downside levels if support fails.
