ZEC Price Drops as Zcash Development Team Resigns Over Governance Dispute

The ZEC price has seen sharp losses on the back of new developments on its ecosystem. This is after Zcash’s core developers resigned from their positions due to a governance-related conflict.

Zcash Governance Rift Sparks ZEC Price Slip

Josh Swihart, CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the main development team behind the project, announced that all ECC employees have quit the company after a disagreement with the Bootstrap board.

According to Swihart, several board members had come into conflict with the mission for which the firm had been founded. He claimed that recent governance actions had changed the employment terms for ECC in a way that the team could no longer bear.

Swihart said the resignations were not truly voluntary. He called it a constructive dismissal. The departing developers are starting a new company, but with the same goal.

“We’re founding a new company, but we’re still the same team with the same mission: building unstoppable private money,” he said.

Notably, he emphasized that in itself, there was no damage to the protocol from this organizational aftermath.

The internal struggle is also reflected in the market, as the ZEC price is down over 7% in the last 24 hours. This is indicative of investor sentiment being cautious due to potential governance issues which could disrupt development.

Meanwhile, Zcash remains one of the best altcoins in terms of privacy. It employs zero-knowledge proofs for secure transactions that do not involve personal details. It is based on the Bitcoin model, which includes privacy as a viable feature for its users.

The relevance of privacy is also debatable in the crypto world. One of its founding members, Eli Ben-Sasson, recalled that in a past conversation with Strategy’s Michael Saylor, privacy aspects in Bitcoin usage were considered unnecessary. ZEC price had been posting impressive gains before its recent downturn.

Adoption Grows Despite Brief Setback

However, despite the above challenges occurring in the management of the project, there has been some development in the interaction of institutions with the project. In the latter part of 2025,  Grayscale filed documents for the conversion of Zcash Trust to a spot ETF.

It’s worth mentioning that Arthur Hayes also expressed that the privacy coin had become the second-most liquid asset in his family office portfolio. Moreover, his forecasts for the ZEC price have also remained bullish.

The adoption at the company level has also sped up. Reliance Global Group announced the consolidation of the company’s entire digital asset treasury in ZEC.

On the other hand, Cypherpunk Technologies has also raised a substantial amount of funds to work on a Zcash treasury strategy on the same coin. Last month, they were able to collect $29 million of the same coin with the goal of accumulating as much of the same circulating within the market.