Zcash’s core development team resigned from Electric Coin Company (ECC) after a governance dispute with the nonprofit Bootstrap and said it plans to form a new company to continue protocol work. The market response was immediate, with ZEC sliding sharply in the hours after the news as uncertainty around governance continuity hit confidence.
The split is rooted in management and governance changes at Bootstrap that developers said altered employment terms and made it harder to operate inside the existing structure. ECC leadership framed the exits as effectively forced, using the terms “malicious governance” and “constructive discharge” to describe why the team left.
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
What the Developers Say They’re Building Next
Developers described the mass resignation as the result of an irreconcilable governance dispute with Bootstrap, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit created to steward ECC and support Zcash. They said changes to employment terms made continued work untenable, leading them to exit ECC and establish an independent firm to keep development moving.
Project founder Zooko Wilcox and departing leadership both emphasized that the Zcash protocol is separate from any corporate entity. The stated goal for the new company is to continue building privacy features and wallet functionality that had been part of ECC roadmaps, including work linked internally to NU5 and NU6.1.
Price action became the most visible real-time indicator of how the market processed the governance shock. Reports placed the immediate drawdown broadly between about 7% and as much as 20%, reflecting concentrated selling tied to uncertainty around leadership, funding, and execution.
What Stayed Intact and What Became Uncertain
Operationally, both the departing developers and ECC spokespeople stressed a clean separation between governance and the open-source protocol. Network nodes, consensus rules, and core privacy primitives were described as intact, with the chain continuing to operate and on-chain mechanics reported as unaffected.
For users, the practical message was continuity of normal network behavior. Transaction processing and privacy functionality were described as continuing without interruption despite the organizational change.
Where uncertainty concentrates is not on whether the chain runs today, but on how development is coordinated going forward. From a compliance and product standpoint, the central risk becomes traceability of developer control and continuity of funding that supports release cycles, institutional relationships, and engineering resources for wallet integrations.
Now the focus shifts to execution signals rather than headlines. Ecosystem participants will watch whether the new firm retains developer capacity, secures funding, and delivers on roadmap items tied to NU5 and NU6.1, because release cadence and funding disclosures will be the practical tests of continuity and renewed confidence.
