The Orgs
No single point of capture is also no single point of contact.
Zcash is unusual among major cryptocurrencies in having a deliberate, multi-party governance structure with multiple independent organizations sharing responsibility. This isn’t accidental, it was set up to balance research, stewardship, and ecosystem funding without any single party holding unilateral control.
Electric Coin Company (ECC)
Section titled “Electric Coin Company (ECC)”Electric Coin Company (ECC) is the original team. Started by Zooko Wilcox in 2015 to ship the Zerocash design as its own chain, ECC was historically the lead protocol developer and flagship-wallet maintainer.
What ECC does today:
- Maintains zcashd (the original full node), and now contributes to zebrad (the Rust-based full node).
- Historically built the Zashi wallet. In Q1 2026 the wallet team left ECC to form ZODL (Zcash Open Development Lab) and the app was renamed “Zodl: Zcash Wallet” (see the restructure note above, and Wallets). ECC no longer ships the flagship wallet.
- Drives major protocol research, the Halo line, Pasta curves, Orchard pool design, and most of the cryptography innovations Zcash has shipped.
- Stewards the trademark and brand.
ECC is a privately held US-based company. It’s funded primarily through its share of the Zcash Dev Fund (see below) along with grants and contracts.
Zcash Foundation (ZF)
Section titled “Zcash Foundation (ZF)”The Zcash Foundation (ZF) is a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded in 2017, whose mission is to steward the Zcash protocol and the broader ecosystem in the public interest.
What ZF does:
- Maintains zebrad, the independent Rust full-node implementation. Having two implementations is a meaningful security property; bugs in one are unlikely to be in the other.
- Stewards ZIPs (Zcash Improvement Proposals) and the upgrade process.
- Hosts the Zcon conference, runs community calls, and funds research directly through its own grant programs.
- Acts as a check on ECC. The two organizations are independent and occasionally disagree publicly on direction, which is a feature of the structure.
ZF is funded primarily through its share of the Dev Fund and philanthropic contributions.
Zcash Community Grants (ZCG)
Section titled “Zcash Community Grants (ZCG)”Zcash Community Grants is a community-elected committee that allocates a portion of the Dev Fund to ecosystem projects, wallets, infrastructure, research, education and outreach.
ZCG was created to address a gap: ECC and ZF do core development, but a healthy ecosystem needs a long tail of wallets, exchanges integrations, educational material, regional community-building, and so on. ZCG funds that long tail through a public application and review process.
The committee is elected from the Zcash community. Grants are public, applications are public, and outcomes are reported back. It’s the most broadly participatory of the three orgs.
The Dev Fund
Section titled “The Dev Fund”The Zcash protocol mints a fixed amount of new ZEC per block as a mining reward. Of that, a defined percentage, currently 20%: is allocated to development funding, split among ECC, ZF, and ZCG.
This is the Dev Fund (originally introduced in ZIP-1014 for the 2020–2024 period; the post-2024 fund structure was set by subsequent ZIPs). It is enforced at consensus level: every miner who finds a block automatically pays the Dev Fund recipients in the block reward, and any block that doesn’t is invalid. There’s no off-chain donation step.
The split has changed over time and is renegotiated through ZIPs at each Dev Fund renewal cycle. The high-level shape:
- A portion to ECC (protocol R&D; the wallet team spun out as ZODL in Q1 2026).
- A portion to ZF (zebrad, ZIPs, ecosystem stewardship).
- A portion to ZCG (community grants).
- A portion that goes back to miners (subject to the period and the specific ZIP).
The next renewal is a topic of active community debate; check the ZIPs and forum threads for the current proposal landscape.
The Q1 2026 restructure
Section titled “The Q1 2026 restructure”In early 2026, the Zcash development ecosystem restructured into a broader set of five independent organizations. The motivation was the same one that produced the three-org model in the first place, sharpened by experience: as the protocol matured, the research, wallet engineering, infrastructure, education, and stewardship functions deserved their own homes.
The historical three (ECC, ZF, ZCG) remain, with somewhat narrower mandates each. The new orgs take on focused slices that previously lived inside ECC or ZF, with their own funding lines and governance.
What this means in practice:
- More throughput on parallel workstreams (wallets, research, infra, education) without intra-org bottlenecks.
- More decisions to follow: instead of “what’s ECC up to,” you may want to check several orgs’ updates each cycle.
- The Dev Fund split is renegotiated through ZIPs to reflect the new structure. Specifics evolve.
Because the post-restructure landscape is still settling at the time of writing, this lesson stops short of naming the five orgs as fixed canon. Treat the list of currently active development orgs as something you confirm from primary sources (forum announcements, zfnd.org, official ZIPs) rather than from a static education site.
The structural point, pluralism is the design, not the bug remains the same.
Why pluralism: not consolidation
Section titled “Why pluralism: not consolidation”The pragmatic case for a three-org structure:
- No single point of capture. No one organization can unilaterally push protocol changes; ZIPs require coordination.
- Two implementations. ECC and ZF maintain independent full nodes, which is a strong defense against implementation-level bugs.
- Clear separation of for-profit and nonprofit. ECC can move fast and contract commercially; ZF holds the public-interest mandate.
- Long-tail funding. ZCG is structurally close to community needs in a way the development orgs aren’t.
The trade-off is that decisions take longer and disagreements are public. For a privacy protocol that needs to be trusted by users worldwide, that’s a feature. Decisions made in private by a single team are exactly what shielded money users are trying to avoid.
How decisions actually get made
Section titled “How decisions actually get made”A typical Zcash decision flow:
- Someone (ECC, ZF, a community member, ZCG-funded researcher) proposes a change.
- A draft ZIP is written and discussed on the forum, GitHub, or community calls.
- The ZIP is iterated through public review.
- ECC and ZF discuss and signal whether they’ll implement.
- If both implement, the change ships in the next network upgrade alongside the broader NU bundle.
- Network upgrades require near-universal node operator and miner adoption to activate; failure to coordinate would simply not activate.
This is slower than “team A pushes a change,” and it’s that way on purpose.
What this means for users
Section titled “What this means for users”If you’re using Zcash:
- You can run your own node: either implementation. That’s a meaningful right, exercised by real people.
- You can read every protocol change as a ZIP before it ships.
- You can apply for funding from ZCG if you want to build something.
- No one can credibly turn the privacy property off: because no single org has the authority. Coordinated capture across ECC, ZF, ZCG, miners, and the user community is the bar. That bar is high.
The next lesson goes deeper into the ZIP process and major upgrades.