Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) is led by Josh Swihart, former ECC CEO, and houses the Zashi wallet technology, now branded as Zodl, which helped boost Zcash usage by expanding the Orchard shielded pool from about 1 million ZEC to 4 million ZEC in 2025.

ZODL has raised over $25 million in its seed funding round, announced on the day of publication, with notable investors including Winklevoss Capital, a16z, Coinbase, Paradigm, Chapter One, David Friedberg, and Balaji Srinivasan.

Cypherpunk Technologies is among the backers, aligning with its privacy-focused mission and providing exposure to a private company building privacy infrastructure for Zcash and related technologies.

The funding aims to accelerate privacy-focused innovations and self-sovereign financial technologies within the Zcash ecosystem.

Cypherpunk specializes in privacy technologies and Zcash-related treasury strategy, with Leap Therapeutics as a subsidiary developing cancer therapies, and it has filed multiple SEC filings for transparency.

Will McEvoy, Cypherpunk’s CIO, emphasizes that ZODL and Cypherpunk are pivotal for advancing privacy technologies and self-sovereign finance, with comments from the Winklevoss twins highlighting anticipated ZEC adoption.

The press release includes standard forward-looking statements and outlines risks related to digital asset investments, market volatility, regulatory conditions, and competition, and provides contact details for Cypherpunk and media/investor relations.

Swihart states Cypherpunk’s backing will help bring shielded ZEC to a broader user base and advance private digital money globally.

Cypherpunk’s ZEC holdings total 294,743.10 coins (about 1.78% of total network ownership) with an average purchase price around $335.89, and Swihart joined Cypherpunk as a strategic advisor in December.

The ZEC treasury is expected to benefit from the investment’s synergy, as Zodl’s wallet improvements could drive greater Zcash adoption and demand for ZEC.

The funding will support hiring and expansion of development as ZODL continues work on the Zcash protocol and aims to build user-friendly private digital payment products, while ECC remains under Bootstrap.

ZODL emerged after the mass departure of ECC’s engineering and product team in January due to governance disputes with Bootstrap, with the goal of continuing core Zcash development under a new structure.