Paradigm, a16z, Winklevoss Capital and Balaji back Zcash lab

Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), formed by the former core team of the Electric Coin Company, has raised more than $25 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Chapter One, Balaji Srinivasan and several angel backers.

The lab was founded by former ECC CEO Josh Swihart after the entire ECC engineering and product team resigned in January following a governance dispute with Bootstrap, the nonprofit board that oversees ECC. The team created ZODL to continue developing core Zcash software and tools.

One focus is Zodl, a self-custodial mobile wallet previously known as Zashi, which supports shielded transactions that hide sender, receiver and amount using zero-knowledge cryptography. Since its 2024 launch the wallet has helped expand activity in Zcash’s shielded pool by more than 400% and has processed over $600 million in ZEC swaps since October.

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