The Zcash Foundation disclosed it ended the first quarter of the year with $36.69 million worth of liquid assets, including $21 million worth of (ZEC), $12.6 million worth of cash and USDC, and lesser amounts of bitcoin and ETH.
First-quarter operating expenses totaled about $817,000, with team compensation the largest category. The latest disclosure aligns with previous Zcash Foundation financial reports, which show capex spending below $1 million in recent quarters.
This stands in contrast to the spending and assets accrued by other crypto non-profits, which often incur huge expenses on incentive and advertising campaigns.
Earlier this year, for instance, the Uniswap Foundation earmarked at least $106.2 million for grants and incentives and another $26.3 million for operating costs and employee token awards through January 2027, according to an unaudited financial statement related to the ongoing “UNIfication” proposal.
Last year, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson floated the idea of investing $100 million worth of ADA tokens held in the Cardano Foundation’s treasury to support the ecosystem’s native DeFi economy.
Several years ago, the Polkadot Foundation was also widely criticized for its major capital expenditures, including $37 million solely on promotions and marketing in 2024.
That said, the Zcash Foundation is not the only non-profit steward of the Zcash ecosystem. Other major organizations include Bootstap, which is the nonprofit organization behind the Electric Coin Company R&D firm, as well as the Winklevoss-supported Swiss organization Shielded Labs.
ECC fallout
Earlier this year, the entire staff at ECC quit to form a new for-profit company called Zcash Open Development Lab, which raised $25 million from leading venture capital firms and angel investors to develop and maintain the leading Zodl wallet.
"Governance disputes within Electric Coin Company led to the departure of much of its development team. We moved quickly to reassure the ecosystem: the Zcash network is, and has always been, a decentralized, open-source protocol. No single organization controls it," Zcash Foundation Executive Director Alex Bornstein said.
The foundation also helped roll out Zcash’s major Zebra 4.0 upgrade in the quarter, and other engineering efforts, including FROST advancements, Z3 stack progress, and NU7 governance polling, as well as AI-powered tools.
Notably, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission closed its probe of the Zcash Foundation in January, helping reduce the regulatory uncertainty that had surrounded the privacy project. "This removes a significant regulatory overhang and allows us to move forward with clarity," Bornstein said Tuesday.
Launched in 2016, Zcash is a leading privacy coin designed as an open, censorship-resistant platform that enables users to make untraceable transactions via shielded addresses. The percentage of shielded Zcash exploded late last year, coinciding with a runup in ZEC’s price, but has since stabilized at under 25%, according to The Block’s data.
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