Zcash’s Founder Now Advises the Wall Street Fund Buying Up His Own Coin
In 1993, Eric Hughes wrote a short document that became something like scripture for a certain kind of person: the Cypherpunk Manifesto. Its argument was simple and, at the time, radical. Privacy in an electronic age wouldn’t be handed down by governments or corporations, because those institutions have no structural reason to grant it. If you wanted privacy, you had to build it yourself, in code, and defend it yourself, without asking permission. Cypherpunks write code. That was the whole ethos, in three words.
It’s worth holding that standard up against the current state of the project most people would name first if you asked them for the cypherpunk-coded privacy coin.
There is, right now, a company trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker CYPH. Its name is Cypherpunk Technologies Inc. It used to be a biotech company called Leap Therapeutics, before a $58.88 million private placement, led by Winklevoss Capital, rebranded it into a Zcash accumulation vehicle. It currently holds several hundred thousand ZEC and has stated a public target of accumulating 5% of the entire circulating supply. It has also invested millions alongside a16z, Coinbase, and Paradigm into Zcash’s development ecosystem.
Sit with that for a second. A publicly traded company, answerable to shareholders and the SEC, has taken the name of a 1990s cryptographic freedom movement and put it on a stock ticker. Not as commentary. As a business strategy. It’s the same playbook Michael Saylor built at MicroStrategy, buy the asset, hold it on the corporate balance sheet, let the stock price track the coin, multiple financial outlets have described Cypherpunk’s approach as explicitly modeled on it.
Here’s the part that actually matters more than any single name attached to it. In December 2023, Zooko Wilcox stepped down as CEO of Electric Coin Company, writing at the time that Zcash’s identity had become too conflated with his own, and that he didn’t think that was healthy for either of them. He went further in early 2025, resigning from the Bootstrap Project board entirely, stepping fully outside the institutional structure he’d built, and moved on to Chief Product Officer at Shielded Labs, a separate research organization. By any reasonable reading, that’s a founder deliberately trying to opt out of exactly the kind of institutional entanglement this piece is describing.
In December 2025, he joined Cypherpunk Technologies as a Strategic Advisor anyway.
That’s the detail worth sitting with, not because it proves Wilcox personally controls anything, he doesn’t, he isn’t on ECC’s board and had no role in January’s implosion, but because of what it says about the gravity involved. A founder who explicitly stepped back from institutional Zcash, specifically to avoid being the personal face of its direction, still ended up back in orbit around a Wall-Street-style accumulation vehicle trading his protocol’s ticker on Nasdaq. If the pull toward capital is strong enough to draw back in someone who visibly tried to leave, that’s not a story about one person’s choices. It’s a story about how much gravity a for-profit company with venture roots generates once it exists, regardless of who’s currently sitting in which chair.
That alone would be worth a raised eyebrow. It’s not the whole story, though. It’s just the most visible symbol of something structural that’s been building for years, and that finally broke into the open this January.
Zcash’s core protocol development has been led since the beginning by the Electric Coin Company, ECC, a for-profit entity legally housed under a nonprofit called Bootstrap. ECC itself was seeded in 2016 with venture capital, a $1 million round led by Pantera Capital, followed by a $2 million round led by Digital Currency Group, with angel investors including Barry Silbert and Erik Voorhees. None of that was hidden. It’s also, on its face, a strange origin story for a project claiming the cypherpunk mantle, cypherpunks write code, they don’t typically pitch decks to venture capital first.
That tension sat mostly dormant for years. Then, on January 8, 2026, it ruptured. The entire ECC team was forced to resign, in what former CEO Josh Swihart publicly called a constructive dismissal, engineered by Bootstrap’s board. The immediate trigger: ECC wanted to privatize Zashi, Zcash’s flagship mobile wallet, spinning it out to raise outside capital and accelerate development. Bootstrap’s board refused, on the grounds that doing so would violate its legal obligations as a nonprofit protecting a public asset. The team left en masse. ZEC dropped 20% within hours, briefly falling below $400. Swihart and his former team have since started a new company to build a competing wallet from the same codebase.
Whatever you think of either side’s position, and there are reasonable arguments on both, notice what the fight was actually about. Not cryptography. Not privacy architecture. A dispute over whether the project’s future should run through more outside capital, adjudicated by a nonprofit board versus a team that wanted to go get funded. That’s not a cypherpunk disagreement. That’s a business disagreement that happened to be wearing cypherpunk clothing.
None of this is a knock on Zcash’s actual technology. Zero-knowledge proofs, zk-SNARKs specifically, are one of the most important cryptographic contributions to come out of this entire space, and Zcash’s team did real, foundational work bringing that research into production. The trusted setup ceremony, the Sapling and Orchard upgrades, the ongoing work on quantum-resistant shielded pools, this is serious cryptography built by serious people. The critique here isn’t about whether Zcash’s engineers know what they’re doing. It’s about what surrounds the engineering: who funds it, who governs it, and what happens when those two things pull in different directions, which, as of January, they very publicly did.
So here’s the question worth sitting with, the one Hughes’ manifesto actually poses, not “which privacy coin has the best marketing” but “which one doesn’t need anyone’s permission or capital to keep existing.”
What would that look like in practice? No founding venture round. No company with a ticker symbol sitting between the protocol and its users. No nonprofit board with legal authority to fire the entire development team over a fundraising dispute. No flagship wallet that can be privatized in the first place, because there’s no private entity positioned to privatize it.
Go through that list one item at a time, because it’s worth checking each claim rather than taking the summary on faith.
No founding venture round. PIVX launched with no ICO, no pre-mine, and no venture round, at any point across its now ten-year history. Every coin in circulation entered the same way everyone else’s did, mined or staked, not allocated to early investors before the public ever got a chance to buy in. There was no seed round to disclose because there was never a seed round.
No company sitting between the protocol and its users. There is no PIVX Inc. There is no CEO whose departure could trigger a 20% price drop, because there’s no CEO whose presence the price ever depended on. Development happens across a distributed set of contributors, funded proposal by proposal, not managed by an entity with a legal existence separate from the community itself.
No board with authority to override the community. PIVX’s treasury is spent exactly one way: anyone can submit a proposal, but only the network’s masternodes, each backed by 10,000 PIV in locked collateral, get to vote on whether it passes, and only if it passes does the treasury pay out. There is no Bootstrap-style nonprofit board sitting above that process with legal power to fire anyone or veto a direction the community has chosen. The vote is the process. There’s no higher authority standing over it, in either direction.
No wallet a company could privatize. This is the part worth sitting with the longest, because it’s almost a direct answer to the exact fight that tore ECC apart in January. PIVX’s own flagship mobile and web wallet is built by PIVX Labs, and it’s funded the same way every other proposal is, through the masternode-voted treasury, not through outside investment. Nobody has ever proposed spinning it out into a company to raise capital, because there’s no mechanism by which that proposal could even be made. The wallet was never a corporate asset in the first place, so there was never a boardroom fight waiting to happen over who gets to sell it.
That’s four separate structural guarantees, not one. Zcash has serious, talented people and genuinely important cryptography. It also has a for-profit company with venture-capital roots, a nonprofit board with legal authority over that company’s biggest decisions, and, as of January, a real, public example of what happens when those two things disagree about whether to raise more outside capital. PIVX was built so that fight structurally cannot happen, not because anyone promised it wouldn’t, but because there’s no company to raise capital, no board to fight about it, and no wallet sitting there as a corporate asset waiting to be spun out.
And credit where it’s due, because none of this is a claim to better cryptography: PIVX’s shielded transactions exist because Zcash’s engineers did the hard, foundational cryptographic work first. PIVX’s SHIELD protocol is a heavily customized implementation of Zcash’s own Sapling protocol, adapted to run on a proof-of-stake network instead of proof-of-work, but the zk-SNARK cryptography underneath traces directly back to Zcash’s research and engineering. That lineage is real, and worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. What differs isn’t the cryptography’s origin. It’s everything built around it since.
Hughes wrote that cypherpunks write code, and that the ones who care about privacy will build it themselves rather than waiting for it to be granted. That’s not a slogan PIVX put on a website. It’s closer to a description of what building without a funding round, a ticker symbol, or a board to answer to actually requires, for ten years running, including through this year’s own stress test, when PIVX lost its Binance listing entirely and kept building anyway, with no company to bail it out and none needed.
The question was never which privacy coin has better marketing, or even, entirely, which one has better cryptography. It’s which one still needs someone else’s permission to keep existing. Only one of them has ever had to answer that question by actually going and finding out.
Edit: An earlier version of this piece described Zooko Wilcox simply as “Zcash’s own founder” advising Cypherpunk Technologies, without noting that he stepped down as ECC’s CEO in 2023 and left the Bootstrap board entirely in 2025, well before January’s implosion. That framing overstated his current role. Thanks to the reader who flagged it, the section above has been corrected and, I think, made into a stronger point in the process.
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