The team from the Electric Coin Company that launched Zcash, and created the Zashi wallet, is now launching a new wallet for Zcash, using the same Zashi codebase we built. The code name for the wallet is cashZ. If you’re a Zashi user, all you need to do is join the waitlist below:

After you’ve joined the waitlist, just sit tight for a few weeks while we boot up cashZ. Once it’s live, we’ll make sure the migration for every Zashi user is as easy as what you experience in Zashi today.

That’s really all you need to know as a Zashi wallet user. But if you’re a Zcash community member, or part of the general public, you might be wondering: first, are we still all in on Zcash? And second, why are we all doing this?

The first question is easy: the entire team that worked at Electric Coin Company and built Zashi is still 100% focused on full-stack Zcash development. We aren't launching any new coins, we're just scaling Zcash. To do that, it required that we leave and start a new Zcash-focused company.

That leads to the next question: why did we start a new company? There are many reasons, but we'll boil them down to three. First, Zcash is cypherpunk, and we need an organization built around that understanding. Second, Zcash is about alignment. And third, Zcash must scale to accomplish our shared mission.

Let's go through these points in turn.

1. Zcash is cypherpunk

Everyone in crypto just lived through a decade of compliance theater. The global crypto community fought unjust laws in dozens of countries to protect basic human rights: simple rights like the right to open the equivalent of a bank account, to hold your own funds, to consensually enter into contracts, and to simply send money to your friends, family, and loved ones.

This effort was not simply about complying with unjust laws. Of course, we must abide by the law, or else be thrown in a cage. But when the law is unjust, we have a moral imperative to work to change the unjust law. One tool for that is code. As Lessig wrote, "code is law" on the Internet. But code is also the next law, even off the Internet. That's because the norms we establish online eventually manage to affect offline behavior, and eventually to change offline laws.

And that's why it's extraordinarily important to make privacy normal online. Zcash is ultimately a peaceful global reform movement, a cypherpunk movement to make privacy normal in the digital world, as it once was during the era of physical cash, when it was simply impossible to trace a dollar bill as it went its way through the economy. That wasn't a dystopian era - far from it.

To do this, we need an organization that has courage. A governance structure that can't cut through red tape will not fight for your privacy rights. That's the first reason why we needed a new governance structure: because we need cypherpunk leadership.

2. Zcash is about alignment

Anyone who's been in crypto more than a few years knows that the entanglement of nonprofit foundations and tech startups has been the cause of endless drama. That's why a16z recently wrote that the foundation era of crypto is over. They didn't mean that all foundations are bad; there are standalone foundations in crypto that do good work, like the Zcash Foundation. What they meant is that due to recent political events, we no longer need to mix foundations and startups for compliance purposes, and can instead simply use the well-understood form of a startup by itself, which is what we are doing.

The reason the mixture of nonprofits and tech startups doesn't work is at its root about misalignment. Nonprofits are about rule-lawyering, while tech startups are about rewriting the rules. Unlike the board of directors of a tech company, the board of directors of a nonprofit typically has no shareholders to hold them to account, no capital contribution in the form of investment, and no labor contribution in the form of code. Contrast this with a typical tech company where the board can be voted out by the shareholders, and is often composed of investors (who've contributed capital) and founding teams (who've contributed labor).

In the past, nonprofits were employed in crypto because years of regulatory assault meant that lawyers advised complicated structures for "compliance" purposes. However, putting multiple organizations together where one is a poorly-governed nonprofit and the other is a rapidly-innovating tech startup is a recipe for misalignment. Often this kind of structure was justified with the rhetoric of "decentralization", but decentralization only helps at the protocol level, or in the form of multiple truly independent, effective organizations. It doesn't work within an organization.

Finally, nonprofits as a class are now under tremendous scrutiny, from universities to activist organizations. It's not clear what the future of the US nonprofit is, as there's a real risk that many will lose their tax exemptions. Basically, there's no benefit in keeping a fast-growing technology company under a nonprofit when the substance of the organization is a for-profit, and there might be real downside.

That's the second reason why we needed a new governance structure: because we need to have the entire team all aligned in a functional structure that is free from bureaucratic lethargy.

3. Zcash must scale

Privacy is normal. But many organizations want to make it abnormal, in order to surveil your every move. Some are concerned about states doing this, while others are concerned about corporations, and others are worried about both. But great power is on the side of surveillance.

There are two ways to balance that power: to be so small they can't see you, or so big they can't stop you. For years, despite Zcash's key contributions to the crypto ecosystem, to zero knowledge, and to privacy, it remained a small cap coin, important in theory but not in practice. It was so small they couldn't see us.

That has changed. Over the last two years, we've seen a complete rebirth of Zcash. This was an ecosystem-wide effort, with everyone from Sean Bowe to genzcash to Shielded Labs pitching in as well as many more who prefer to remain unnamed; this is Zcash after all! We do think a significant part of that rebirth was due to the members of our team, who built Zashi and the Electric Coin Company.

As a consequence of the rebirth of Zcash, we are no longer so small they can't see us. Everyone can see us. We now need to get so big they can't stop us. As big as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Stablecoins. Big as in billions of users. Getting there requires us to be an organization that's built to scale.

That's the third reason why we needed a new governance structure: because Zcash must become so big they can't stop us, and we must scale to succeed.

There's so much more we can and will say, but for the time being actions will speak louder than words. We're hard at work on the wallet and you should sign up for the waitlist to join us. We're onboarding billions to Zcash, and you could be among the first.