The development team, which left Electric Coin Company in January to launch the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), has raised over $25 million from companies such as a16z Crypto and Coinbase Ventures to continue building the privacy-focused, standalone Zodl wallet.
ZODL was founded by former ECC CEO Josh Swihart and includes the entire engineering and product team that previously worked on the Zodl portfolio at ECC. They dropped out due to disagreements with Bootstrap, the nonprofit that oversees ECC, over how Zcash should function as a privacy protocol.
ZODL he said in X’s Monday post that cryptocurrency investment firms Paradigm, Winklevoss Capital, Cypherpunk Technologies, Maelstrom and Chapter One were among the other participants in the $25 million funding round.
Former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, Silicon Valley investor David Friedberg and Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi also contributed.
ZODL said the broad support “reflects the strong belief of some of the most respected cryptocurrency investors not only in the principle of privacy, but also in the continued development of the Zcash ecosystem,” adding that it will utilize the funds to expand its engineering team.
The open-source Zodl wallet is one of the main infrastructures powering the Zcash ecosystem.
The Zodl wallet was originally launched by ECC under Swihart’s leadership as Zashi, before ZODL changed its name to the Zodl wallet in February.
Zcash jumps almost 10% in 24 hours
Zcash (ZEC) was one of the better performing privacy tokens last year, with its price increasing almost tenfold from $55.86 to $527.84 amid renewed interest in privacy-focused protocols.
While ZEC was impacted by a broader withdrawal from the cryptocurrency market from 2026, its price rose 4.1% to $217.80 on news of its latest funding round, CoinGecko data can be seen.
Related: A U.S. Treasury Report Notes Legal Use of Privacy for Cryptocurrency Mixers
ZODL stated that the Zodl wallet has enabled over $600 million worth of ZEC exchanges since October 2025, while noting that the protected Zcash pool has grown by over 400% since its launch in 2024.
Zcash Protected Pool is the protocol’s main feature that allows transactions to be pooled so that sender, recipient and amount details remain hidden and untraceable.
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