Privacy Coin Zcash Drops 20% as Core Dev Team Departs Electric Coin Company

Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency based around the use of zero-knowledge proofs, saw its price fall more than 20% overnight following the abrupt resignation of its entire core development team from Electric Coin Company (ECC), according to an announcement by CEO Josh Swihart. The team cited constructive discharge, pointing to changes in employment terms imposed by Bootstrap (a nonprofit that oversees ECC) that made it impossible to uphold their duties while staying true to Zcash’s mission of creating private digital money.

Board members, including Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai, were accused of misalignment, prompting the devs to form a new company to better focus on their mission of Zcash protocol and software development.

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

The recent price dip erased part of Zcash’s strong 2025 run, where it climbed 1,900% to a high of roughly $700 amid renewed emphasis on privacy in crypto, although many skeptics claim this was more of a narrative promoted by short-term traders rather than the development of a long-term, fundamental change in the industry.

By Thursday morning, Zcash had recovered slightly to around $420 from an overnight low of around $385. When the Zcash chart is completely zoomed out, the price is around the highs hit in late 2017, but down substantially since then when it’s denominated in bitcoin, which is often pointed to as the more relevant point of comparison when valuing crypto assets.

Zcash’s 2025 price surge is tied to broader concerns over Bitcoin’s lack of built-in privacy, highlighted by Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio in October when he flagged the network’s transparent ledger as a vulnerability to government control and interference, limiting its appeal for central banks. VanEck CEO Jan van Eck later echoed this sentiment, questioning Bitcoin’s ability to guard against quantum computing threats and claiming that some early Bitcoin holders were turning to Zcash for stronger privacy features.

Despite its touted privacy features, Zcash has historically lagged in price action compared to its peers, even as supporters like Edward Snowden, who participated in its 2016 launch under the pseudonym John Dobbertin, praised its potential utility for financial anonymity. That said, institutional backing has grown, with Grayscale filing for a Zcash ETF and the Winklevoss twins’ digital asset treasury company Cypherpunk Holdings deploying over $50 million into Zcash last year.

In practice, Monero, which is another privacy-focused altcoin, has long been the go-to for users seeking privacy in illicit activities, having largely displaced bitcoin on darknet markets, ransomware payments, and hacking schemes since around 2016. However, according to a report from CoinDesk, regulatory friction with Monero at the exchange level has led to a return to Bitcoin for these sorts of crypto users.

During its 2025 price run, Zcash was able to overtake the market cap of Monero despite its relatively low level of adoption in these areas. However, Monero has retaken the privacy coin in light of these recent developments.

Critics have long targeted Zcash’s structure, including heavy reliance on ECC and VC funding, often seen as prioritizing profits over utility. A specific issue that is often brought up is the 20% developer tax on block rewards, which funds protocol work but raises centralization fears, potentially inviting legal attacks.

This concern was amplified after U.S. prosecutions against privacy-focused bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet and Ethereum-based privacy application Tornado Cash, where prosecutors emphasized profits from fees as evidence of complicity. But Zcash sees far less adoption in criminal and money laundering circles, which may partly explain its lower regulatory scrutiny so far, despite centralizing forces in its overall structure.

Notably, dynamics associated with the dev tax have changed over time in a way that affected distributions to ECC amidst these centralization concerns.

Crypto at large has trended in a more centralized direction in recent years, with profit-seeking tech entrepreneurs becoming increasingly reliant on centrally issued stablecoins. This has led to a split between philosophically focused cypherpunks and traditional fintech entrepreneurs who use blockchains for optics and regulatory arbitrage rather than true decentralization and user empowerment.