Privacy coin sector surges again. On the 8th of this month, Josh Swihart, CEO of Electric Coin Company (ECC), the core development company behind Zcash, spoke out on social media, announcing that the entire ECC team has collectively resigned.

The trigger for the incident stems from deep disagreements at the governance level. Swihart openly stated that the majority of the board members of ECC's parent organization, Bootstrap (a non-profit organization)—including Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai—have clearly deviated from Zcash's original mission. He pointed out that yesterday's alleged dismissal of ZCAM forced the team to make the difficult decision to leave.

"Our employment terms were unilaterally modified," Swihart admitted, "which prevented us from fulfilling our duties with integrity and effectiveness." His words reveal a strong disappointment with the current governance structure.

It is worth noting that Swihart later emphasized that the impact of this turmoil is limited. The Zcash protocol itself remains completely unaffected. The initial reason for the resignation decision was to protect the team's years of technological achievements and prevent them from being subjected to improper governance interference—interference that has made ECC unable to uphold its original mission: to create truly unstoppable privacy currencies.

The departing team has already begun establishing a new company to continue upholding the same privacy principles. This internal split reflects the tensions that can arise between governance structures and technical teams during the rapid development of privacy coin projects. For ZEC holders and the community, how to balance decentralized decision-making with technological stability remains a key issue to watch.