Zodl

The Zodl wallet’s predecessor was Zashi, a mobile wallet launched by the Electric Coin Company (ECC), Zcash’s developer. From 2024, ECC made delivering the best experience for ZEC users its top priority; Zashi launched in 2024 and, on its first anniversary on April 28, 2025, released a completely redesigned version 2.0. On September 16, 2025, Zashi introduced CrossPay, letting holders of shielded ZEC pay privately in any NEAR-supported cryptocurrency, and on October 1, Zashi 2.4 added decentralized swaps powered by NEAR Intents.⁠[1][1][2][3][4][4]

In January 2026, the entire ECC team — including Zcash’s original developers and the Zashi product team — left ECC under CEO Josh Swihart and formed a new company, Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), naming its flagship wallet Zodl. ZODL said the move was necessary to drive Zcash’s growth and adoption of shielded ZEC without relying on the Zcash development fund. The board of Bootstrap, ECC’s parent organization, attributed the dispute to a plan to privatize Zashi, arguing that the arrangement could give donors grounds to sue and jeopardize the Zcash ecosystem.⁠[5][5][6][6]

On February 16, 2026, ZODL announced that Zashi would be renamed Zodl in the next app update, with no need for users to download a new app, change their seed phrase or transfer funds. On February 26, Zashi was renamed on the App Store; on March 2, Zodl went live on Google PlayGoogle PlayGoogle Play is a digital content distribution service operated by Google, centered on the Google Play Store, the app store for Android devices. Its predecessor, Android Market, launched in October 2008 alongside the first Android phone, and in March 2012 it merged with Google Music and the Google eBookstore and was renamed Google Play. As the main distribution channel for Android apps, its commissions, billing rules, and review practices have drawn controversy, including the Epic Games antitrust lawsuit in the United States and penalties under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.Open the full entry, with F-Droid, GitHub and the Solana dApp Store to follow.⁠[5][5][7][8][8]

On March 9, 2026, ZODL announced it had raised 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, Cypherpunk Technologies, Maelstrom and Chapter One, along with individuals such as Balaji SrinivasanBalaji SrinivasanBalaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur, investor and the author of The Network State, the founder of Network School, and a former chief technology officer of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded Counsyl and 21, along with its successor product Earn.com, was involved in projects such as Coin Center, and has backed companies such as fomo as an angel investor.Open the full entry, David Friedberg and Haseeb Qureshi. ZODL said the Zodl wallet had driven growth in the Zcash shielded pool of more than 400% since its 2024 launch and facilitated more than $600 million in ZEC swaps since October 2025; the funding would be used to add engineers and other talent.⁠[9][9][9][9]

On March 23, 2026, security researcher Alex “Scalar” Sol reported to 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 a vulnerability that caused zcashd to skip Sprout proof verification. The next day, ZODL engineers Daira-Emma Hopwood, Kris Nuttycombe and Jack Grigg validated the issue; Grigg wrote the patch and the other two reviewed it, and major mining pools deployed it within three days. The bug was not exploited, and zcashd v6.12.0 was released on March 31.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

On May 28, 2026, ZODL released Zodl 3.5.0, the first to offer shielded coinholder polling directly in the wallet (in beta), developed together with the Valar team and supporting votes reviewed and signed on Keystone hardware wallets, for use in the upcoming NU7 coinholder poll; votes are private and funds never leave the wallet.⁠[11][11][11][11]

Late on May 29, 2026, Taylor Hornby, an independent security researcher auditing the protocol on behalf of Shielded Labs, privately disclosed a critical flaw in Orchard’s zero-knowledge proof circuit to ZODL core engineers. On May 30, Hopwood, Nuttycombe and Grigg confirmed the issue within hours and identified a path forward, then informed CEO Josh Swihart, who began coordinating the ecosystem response; private coordination with miners and exchanges began on the evening of May 31.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][13]

The fix proceeded in two steps: first a soft fork temporarily disabled Orchard, since a direct patch would have revealed details of the flaw, and then a hard fork updated the zero-knowledge proof circuit to complete the fix. The first soft-fork activation failed because of deployment coordination problems; ZODL’s engineers produced a second patch that activated at block height 3,363,426, and Orchard transactions were suspended for about 24 hours. The network upgrade was completed in the early hours of June 3, restoring Orchard transactions. ZODL said there was no evidence the vulnerability had been exploited, that user privacy and the total ZEC supply were unaffected, and that this was the second security-driven protocol upgrade in Zcash’s history since its 2016 launch.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12][12][12][12][12]

On June 6, 2026, ZODL, together with Tachyon, Valar GroupValar GroupValar Group is a cryptography research and engineering team focused on developing the Zcash protocol, led by Osmosis co-founder Dev Ojha and staffed largely by engineers from Osmosis and Celestia; in 2026 it took part in the Ironwood network upgrade, released the full-node software Zakura with Project Tachyon, and built Zcash’s private coinholder voting chain.Open the full entry, the Zcash Foundation and Shielded Labs, proposed the Ironwood network upgrade: a new shielded pool using the Orchard protocol backed by formal verification and independent audits, with funds from the old pool migrating through a turnstile so that anyone can audit ZEC’s circulating supply. ZODL’s work included completing the development needed to deprecate zcashd (including Zallet, a command-line wallet replacing zcashd’s built-in wallet), participating in formal verification of the new pool, working with the Zcash Foundation to roll out zebrad to node operators still running zcashd, and updating the Zodl wallet and SDKs to support Ironwood.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][14][14]

On July 28, Ironwood activated as NU6.3 at block height 3,428,143; Zodl 3.8.0 already included Ironwood support, letting users manually migrate Orchard funds to Ironwood within the app without creating a new wallet or changing their address.⁠[15][15][15][15]

In August 2026, ZODL released Zodl 3.9.0 with privacy-preserving Ironwood migration tools and a new-generation sync engine, ZODL Slipstream; the subsequent version 3.10.0 restored in-wallet voting with support for ZEC held in Ironwood, ahead of the NU7 coinholder poll. That month, Pretty Good Policy for Zcash (PGPZ), a policy effort started by Paul Brigner and supported by ZODL, announced it was becoming an independent 501(c)(4) organization dedicated to Zcash. In September, ZODL shipped five Zodl releases, expanded coinholder polling, added unified viewing-key export and contributed a range of upstream improvements to the Zcash protocol and cryptography libraries.⁠[16][16][16][16][17][17][17]

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

ZODL’s work has two parts: core Zcash protocol development, where the engineers who designed, implemented and maintained Zcash’s critical systems at ECC continue their work, and the Zcash user experience, namely developing the flagship Zodl wallet. All of its code is open source. ZODL’s mission is a world without mass financial surveillance, where law-abiding people can transact freely and privately.⁠[19][19][19][19][19]

Zodl is a self-custodial mobile wallet designed for shielded Zcash. Its features include payments between shielded ZEC users, CrossPay for paying others privately in the crypto asset they prefer, private swaps powered by NEAR Intents, cold storage of shielded ZEC by connecting a Keystone hardware wallet, and payments at retailers such as GameStop, Sheetz and Chipotle.⁠[20][20][20][20][20][20]

Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL): Official website: https://zodl.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/zodl_co (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/zodl_app (opens in a new window)⁠[22][20]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/zodl-inc (opens in a new window)⁠[20]