Josh Swihart

Before entering the Zcash ecosystem, Swihart was co-founder and vice president of software development at 3t Systems, global practice principal at Interlink Group, senior vice president of global marketing at K2, and CEO and owner of Aspenware; these companies were later acquired by EMC and TPG, Francisco Partners, and Aspen Ski Company and Alterra Resorts, respectively. He has long advocated for underserved people, most actively for residents of the slums of Mumbai and Pune, India.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Swihart joined the Electric Coin Company (ECC), Zcash’s developer, in 2018, first as director of marketing and later as senior vice president. In August 2021, as ECC moved from an engineering-led to a market-led product strategy, Swihart took on the product strategy function while continuing to oversee the growth and regulatory relations team, and formed a product strategy team with Zooko Wilcox, Nathan Wilcox and Steven Smith. In May 2023, ECC restructured under bear-market financial pressure, laying off 13 employees, about half of its team.⁠[2][3][3][3][4][4]

On December 18, 2023, the board of Bootstrap, ECC’s parent organization, announced that Swihart, formerly ECC’s senior vice president of growth, would return to ECC and succeed Zooko Wilcox, who had led the company since 2015, as CEO, responsible for all strategic and tactical decisions; Zooko remained a Bootstrap director. The board said it expected Swihart to find product-market fit, improve Zcash’s usability and increase adoption.⁠[5][5][5][5]

Swihart published an open letter the same day thanking Zooko, whom he had known for six years, and setting three near-term priorities: removing friction within ECC and the community that impedes rapid iteration, dramatically increasing Zcash’s utility through user-focused products, and securing ECC’s financial sustainability. Zooko said the two often disagreed about how to do things but never about why.⁠[6][6][6][6][2]

Under Swihart, ECC focused from 2024 on the Zcash user experience and launched the mobile wallet Zashi; ZODL says the app drove growth in the Zcash shielded pool of more than 400% after its launch. When ECC reorganized in December 2025, it said that in the two years since Swihart took the helm, Zashi had evolved from a barebones prototype into the most trusted and robust interface for Zcash, driving adoption of shielded ZEC and directing protocol development; during the product function’s transition, he continued to guide Zashi’s development personally.⁠[7][8][8][8][8]

On May 1, 2024, ECC announced it would no longer accept funds paid directly by the protocol under a new development fund, supporting either letting the fund expire that November or replacing it with grant pools managed in a decentralized way and paid out by deliverables or retroactive outcomes. On May 24, Swihart, as CEO, published a ZIP on the Zcash Community Forum proposing to extend the current development fund by up to one year to allow time to design a new non-direct funding model. The Community and Coinholder funding model he originally proposed became ZIP 1016: from November 2025 until the third halving in 2028, 12% of block rewards go to a coinholder-directed grants program and 8% continue to fund Zcash Community Grants.⁠[9][9][10][10][11][11]

On January 7, 2026, Swihart posted on X that a majority of Bootstrap’s board — Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless and Michelle Lai — had moved into clear misalignment with Zcash’s mission, and that the entire ECC team had left the previous day after being “constructively discharged,” as changed employment terms made it impossible to perform their duties effectively and with integrity; he said the team would found a new company with the same mission of building “unstoppable private money,” and that the Zcash protocol was unaffected.⁠[12][12][12][12][12]

The Bootstrap board, for its part, issued a statement saying it had spent recent weeks discussing external investment and alternative structures to privatize Zashi while working with counsel to ensure compliance with US nonprofit law; it argued the arrangement could invite politically motivated attacks and give donors grounds to sue, jeopardizing the entire Zcash ecosystem. Zooko Wilcox posted that users could safely continue to use Zcash and that, in his personal experience, the board members named were people of exceptionally high integrity. After the news, ZEC fell more than 10% in a day.⁠[13][13][13][13][14]

Swihart then founded Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), which the entire former ECC team joined, and the Zashi wallet was renamed Zodl. On March 9, 2026, ZODL announced a seed round of more than $25 million, with investors including Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss CapitalWinklevoss CapitalWinklevoss Capital is a family office and early-stage venture capital firm founded in New York in 2012 by brothers Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss. It got its start by buying large amounts of bitcoin and has since invested in companies such as Gemini, Flexport, and Crusoe Energy and in crypto networks such as Ethereum, Zcash, and Filecoin; since 2025 it has led and driven the transformation of Nasdaq-listed Leap Therapeutics into Cypherpunk Technologies, which holds Zcash as its treasury asset.Open the full entry, Coinbase Ventures and Balaji Srinivasan. In March, he was among the ZODL-side authors of the disclosure of the fix for a zcashd Sprout proof-verification vulnerability.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][15][15]

On May 30, 2026, after ZODL engineers confirmed the Orchard counterfeiting vulnerability reported by security researcher Taylor Hornby and identified a fix, they informed CEO Swihart, who began coordinating the ecosystem response; a two-stage emergency network upgrade completed the fix in early June. On June 5, Swihart wrote on X that he was not taking a fixed position on Shielded LabsShielded LabsShielded Labs is a nonprofit Zcash support organization based in Switzerland, established as a Swiss association in December 2022. It operates mainly on donations and has never received Zcash Development Fund money or block rewards. It leads protocol proposals including the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) and Crosslink, a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus, and after a researcher it engaged discovered the Orchard counterfeiting vulnerability in 2026, it proposed and advanced the Ironwood upgrade together with other development teams.Open the full entry’ suggestion of a second Orchard pool, and that the more important goal was ensuring such vulnerabilities never recur, for which the best answer was formal verification; he argued the flaw lay in the handwritten circuit rules rather than the underlying cryptography, and that if the existing Orchard circuit could be formally verified, a verified new Orchard pool ahead of Tachyon might be a good interim step.⁠[16][16][17][17][17][17]

On October 9, 2026, Swihart spoke as Zodl’s representative at the Zcash Zummit session of Network State Conference 2026 in Singapore, where the conference introduced him as Zodl’s founder.⁠[18][18]

Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL): Official website: https://zodl.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jswihart (opens in a new window)⁠[19]