Zcash CEO Zooko Wilcox Announced Her Resignation

Zcash CEO Zooko Wilcox announced her resignation

According to a recent blog post, Electric Coin founder and CEO Zooko Wilcox announced her resignation. Electric Coin then appointed Josh Swihart immediately to the position of Chief Operating Officer. Meanwhile, Mr. Zooko Wilcox will still hold the position of director on the board of directors of parent company Bootstrap Project.

A new season begins. @jswihart, formerly SVP of Growth at ECC, returns to ECC and takes over the reins from @Zooko as CEO. Zooko will continue as a director on the board of the Bootstrap Project, the parent company of ECC. https://t.co/fsHNf5JHkY

— Electric Coin Co. (@ElectricCoinCo) December 18, 2023

Wilcox has held the leadership role of Electric Coin since 2015 and is known as the “Satoshi of Zcash” due to the important contributions he brings to the project. In the post, Wilcox said he will spend the next few months thinking about how to support Zcash, as it is an important part of his life.

Zcash is an anonymous blockchain that has the advantage of hiding transaction information. This means that on the Zcash blockchain, information about the sending wallet address, receiving wallet address and transfer amount is not displayed. Although not a popular network, Zcash is still used by the community because of its anonymous nature.

Because it is built on the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, Zcash has faced the risk of “51% attack”, an issue discovered and warned about by Coinbase in September 2023. A 51% attack occurs when an individual or group of people controls more than half of the block mining capacity on the network, allowing them to perform actions such as changing the blockchain’s data history.

To solve this problem, the Electric Coin development team has come up with a solution called “Trailing Finality Layer,” to convert Zcash from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.

Regarding the new CEO, Josh Swihart has worked at Electric Coin for nearly 6 years. He started working at Electric Coin from the position of Marketing Director in August 2018. By 2021, he moved to the position of Vice President in charge of Growth and has now been appointed CEO.

Josh Swihart

Electric Capital said about the new CEO in a statement:

“We are confident in Josh’s leadership in finding product-market fit, opening up new partnerships and collaborations, improving Zcash usability, and increasing adoption. In addition to his vision for ECC and his optimistic passion for Zcash, Josh has a strong business, technical, and product background.”

Chart of ZEC/USDT

Zcash’s ZEC token price immediately after the news of the veteran CEO’s resignation dropped slightly by 6% to a low of 27.4 USD, then quickly returned to the current 29 USD.

ZEC/USDT chart on Tradingview at 7:50 December 19, 2023 (UTC)