No, Zcash Devs Didn’t Quit 🤦
OVERVIEW
No, Zcash Devs Didn’t Quit 🤦
Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:
Source: finviz
And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:
Source: TradingView
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NEWS
Zcash’s Core Dev Team Resigns: What Actually Happened 🧠
The entire Electric Coin Company development team resigned, triggering a 15-20% drop in $ZEC ( ▼ 9.06% ). But it’s not how crypto social is making it sound. 🤦
The Departure
Josh Swihart, CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC) – the primary organization responsible for developing Zcash – announced that his entire team had resigned after what he called a “constructive discharge” by the Bootstrap board.
Twitter tweet
Swihart named four Bootstrap board members – Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai – as having “moved into clear misalignment with the mission of Zcash.” Bootstrap is the nonprofit created in 2020 to govern ECC.
“The terms of our employment were changed in ways that made it impossible for us to perform our duties effectively and with integrity,” Swihart wrote.
The Board’s Response
Bootstrap released a statement offering a different account:
Click for full statement.
The board stated it was working with legal counsel to ensure compliance with U.S. nonprofit law and to avoid jeopardizing the Zcash community.
They warned that the proposed restructuring could expose the project to donor lawsuits and “politically motivated attacks,” citing OpenAI’s contentious for-profit transition as a cautionary example.
Zooko’s Position
Zcash founder Zooko, who stepped down as ECC CEO in December 2023, weighed in from the sidelines. He reassured users that the Zcash network remains “open source, permissionless, secure, and private” and is unaffected by the dispute.
Twitter tweet
Drama Drama Drama
This kerflufle is just one of many recent kerfluffles:
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Wilcox stepped down as ECC CEO in December 2023
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Peter Van Valkenburgh resigned from the Zcash Foundation board in January 2025
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ECC announced a significant internal reorganization on December 1st, consolidating teams and restructuring operations
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The Zcash development fund, which uses mining rewards to pay for protocol development, was set to expire in 2025
How do Stocktwits and Cryptotwits users feel about this? Well, ya’ll are smarter than the average trader/investor/analyst.
Stocktwits Zcash Sentiment Score
Because despite the OMG THE SKY IS FALLING WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE AAAAAAAAHHHH that the rest of the crypto space was experiencing, ya’ll kept chill – as evidence by the message volume sitting neutral and sentiment still bullish. 🐂
NEWS
Flow’s $3.9M Exploit Was Really An $88 Billion Heist That Failed 🤯
Flow released a post-mortem on the December 27th attack. An attacker exploited Flow’s Cadence runtime to duplicate tokens, extracting roughly $3.9M before validators halted the network. 🛑
Cadence uses resource-oriented programming where tokens can only be moved, never copied – like magic toys that can only exist in one place at a time. The attacker found a way to make the system think a “magic toy” was just a picture of one. Pictures can be photocopied. So they photocopied real assets 42 times, creating trillions in counterfeit tokens.
They pulled this off through three exploits:
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Smuggled malformed data through poorly-validated “attachment” fields
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Hid it inside a trusted system type (PublicKey) that skipped security checks
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Exploited contract deployment logic that checked what an item was but not what the system said it was
The Damage
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Counterfeit created: 87.96B FLOW
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Actually extracted: $3.9M
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Deposited to exchanges: 1.094B FLOW
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Recovered and destroyed: 484M FLOW
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Contained on-chain: 98.7%
Why It Wasn’t Worse
Showing up at exchanges with 100M+ FLOW at once looks suspicious. Most deposits were frozen immediately. Only funds bridged out via Celer, deBridge, and Stargate before the 6-hour halt actually escaped – then laundered through THORChain and Chainflip.
Flow handled this reasonably well. They chose surgical ‘Isolated Recovery’ over a full rollback, preserving legitimate transaction history and avoiding reconciliation nightmares for partners. T
But there’s still 605M counterfeit FLOW still stuck at uncooperative exchanges. And there’s questions about how deploying 40+ malicious contracts didn’t trigger anomaly detection?
But hey, at least the team is professional enough to address and report on what happened and what they’re doing about it. 👍️
NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️
🔐 Mina’s 2025 Was Quiet Progress
Sometimes heads-down building beats narrative chasing. The protocol delivered 53K+ zkApp transactions, 18 releases, and passed 4 on-chain votes including the Mesa upgrade that brings faster transactions and 4x more on-chain state. Zeko Protocol hit 500K transactions with 100x faster slot times than current Mina, and zkNoid’s lottery went live with 3K+ MINA in the pot. Mina Protocol.
💳 Alchemy Pay Now Has 11 U.S. State Licenses
The Kansas Money Transmitter License brings their regulatory footprint to eleven states. December also saw integrations with Stable, Starknet, Japan Open Chain, and a zero-fee USDC campaign with Coinbase and other major exchanges. Alchemy Pay.
🤖 Fetch.ai Rebranded as the Google of AI Agents
The protocol evolved from developer-focused R&D into a full-stack ecosystem for autonomous agents – ASI:One for personal AI, Agentverse as a discovery engine, and Fetch Business for brands to claim verified agent handles. Just as Google indexes websites, Fetch.ai makes the agent-based web discoverable and interoperable. Fetch.AI.
NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️
🎁 Decentraland Made Gifting as Easy as Clicking Someone’s Avatar
Direct in-world gifting is live – click a user, hit the three dots, select “Gift,” and send Wearables or Emotes without leaving the world. No tabs, no marketplace detours, just instant sharing during social moments. Decentraland.
🔗 HTTPayer Turns Payments Into Permissions on SKALE
The x402 payment standard lets agents and developers access infrastructure through per-request payments instead of accounts or subscriptions. HTTPayer built the first cross-chain x402 execution via WebSocket, and SKALE’s gasless environment removes the friction. Pay on one chain, access services on another. SKALE Network.
NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦
🔄 0x Spent 2025 Powering Coinbase, Base App, and Basically Everyone Else
The DEX aggregator now handles swaps for Coinbase’s tens of millions of users, powers the Base App, and got added to Coinbase Developer Platform – all while cutting latency to twice as fast as competitors. They acquired Flood for Solana aggregation, added 6 new chains, and grew headcount 40%. 0x.
🏠 Jito Foundation Is Moving Back to America and Burning JTO
After years of offshore operations due to regulatory hostility, Jito announced plans to bring core Foundation operations to U.S. soil. JIP-31 proposes redirecting 100% of protocol revenue to BAM validators as an early adopter subsidy, and the Cryptoeconomics subDAO burned 3.7M JTO in December. The Solana MEV infrastructure is growing up. Jito.
⚡ Hyperliquid’s 2025 Was $32B Daily Volume and Zero External Funding
The HyperEVM launched, USDH went live via governance vote, native USDC integrated, and the Assistance Fund HYPE got officially burned. They went from a handful of early believers to hundreds of teams building without taking a dime of VC money. Oh, and it gave us James Wynn. Hyperliquid.
LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗
Bessent Believes Trump Will Decide The Next Fed Chair This Month
CLOid Home Robot Doing Laundry Demonstrated
For its gaming hardware contingent, CES 2026 was a good week to bury good news
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