As we look back on 2025, Zcash Foundation (ZF) celebrates a year of progress, collaboration, and strategic growth that strengthened the Zcash ecosystem and advanced financial privacy for the public good. Across technical development, governance, and community initiatives, our shared work this year reflected the Foundation’s enduring belief that privacy is essential infrastructure for human dignity.
The year began with transition and renewal. In the first quarter, ZF bid farewell to longtime Executive Director Jack Gavigan, whose leadership over four years left an indelible mark on the organization and the broader Zcash community. With Jack’s departure, COO Alex Bornstein served as Interim Executive Director.
This period also marked a season of community empowerment and collaboration: the results of the Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) election brought new energy to participatory grantmaking, and the Foundation introduced a new Zcash trademark policy ensuring that Zcash’s identity remains protected while fostering broader adoption. Our flagship conference, Zcon VI, held virtually and co-curated with ecosystem partners, showcased the power of decentralization and cross-ecosystem collaboration, followed by the inaugural in-person Zcash Dev Summit in Sofia—a pivotal step toward fostering technical dialogue and innovation. In recognition of our broader organizational excellence, ZF earned a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, affirming our commitment to transparency and accountability.
The following quarter built on that momentum with strengthened internal alignment and long-term planning under interim executive leadership. A major governance milestone was the ZF Board’s endorsement and community’s adoption of the Community & Coinholder (C&C) Funding Model, a participatory framework that balances community input and coinholder governance with an eye toward long-term sustainability and decentralized decision-making. Extensive ZCAP polling and coinholder participation underscored strong community support for this framework. The Foundation also emphasized team cohesion and strategic alignment through an in-person staff retreat, fostering collaboration and planning as ZF continued to evolve in service of the ecosystem.
During the third quarter, ZF entered a new phase of mission-driven impact and global engagement. The quarter’s centerpiece achievement was the launch of Shielded Aid Initiative, an innovative effort to apply Zcash’s privacy-preserving capabilities to humanitarian aid delivery. By helping NGOs protect vulnerable recipients and align with international data protection standards, this initiative highlights the real-world potential of privacy technology.
Complementing this work, ZF shared its Three-Year Vision for Community Events—a roadmap for inclusive, global gatherings that strengthen learning, collaboration, and participation across the Zcash community. This strategy encompasses a range of convenings, including virtual and in-person events such as Zcomm, Zcash Dev Summits, Zcon Voices, and the flagship Zcon7 in 2026. We also made significant updates to the Zcash Community Forum’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, aligning community governance tools with international data protection standards and reaffirming ZF’s commitment to responsible governance.
During the final quarter of the year, the Foundation announced several momentous leadership appointments, most notably the ZF Board’s appointment of Alex Bornstein as Executive Director. Reflecting on ZF’s direction and the broader Zcash ecosystem, Bornstein emphasized the importance of collaboration and execution in realizing Zcash’s long-term vision:
“Zcash’s future will be defined by bold coordination and relentless execution. Our strength lies in collaboration—with the Foundation’s world-class engineers, our partners at ECC, Shielded Labs, ZCG, QEDIT, ZecHub, and the global community driving innovation every day. Together, we’re not just sustaining momentum, we’re pioneering the next generation of privacy technology. The world needs privacy that scales, and Zcash will deliver it.”
Two other key leadership appointments were announced during this same period, Danika Delano as Chief Operating Officer and Pili Guerra as Head of Engineering, reflecting our commitment to promoting from within and recognizing the exceptional talent that has been instrumental to our success.
ZF also introduced the new Zcash Foundation website that includes a donation page, designed to improve accessibility and public accountability.
ZF transitioned ZCAP voting from the legacy Helios platform to Secure Internet Voting (SIV), which is a modern, cryptographically transparent and privacy-respecting system chosen for its responsive support, enhanced auditability and alignment with community values. The election engagement in the first SIV-powered ZCG election was excellent, with a record turnout!
Amid renewed momentum for Zcash this quarter, Alex spoke on the global stage at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy’s panel, “Humanitarian Futures: Still here, still human – what next?” The event brought together leaders to explore how the sector can adapt to global challenges through resilience and innovation. Alex’s participation highlighted Zcash’s growing relevance and elevated awareness of ZF’s Shielded Aid Initiative and its privacy-preserving approach to humanitarian response. Alex was also a featured guest on Cointelegraph’s “Chain Reaction” podcast, where he discussed the growing significance of Zcash and its role in humanitarian aid and digital financial inclusion.
Parallel to these organizational milestones, ZF sustained high-impact engineering momentum by strengthening the open-source infrastructure that Zcash depends on for day-to-day reliability and long-term protocol evolution. Across four major Zebra releases: Zebra 2.5.0 Release (deploying NU6.1 on the public Testnet), Zebra 3.0.0-rc.0 Release (locking in the mainnet activation parameters and hardening CI/Docker), Zebra 3.0.0 Release: Our Most Feature-Rich Release Ever (a production-readiness step-change, including platform support and operational tooling), and Zebra 3.1.0 Release (stability and infrastructure-focused improvements for operators). This work in total: reduced systemic risk and improved node operability in ways that directly strengthen network resilience. That delivery cadence was matched by rigorous third-party assurance: the Zebra NU6.1 Audit by Least Authority reinforced confidence that Zebra’s consensus-critical changes were implemented with the level of scrutiny required for high-stakes network upgrades.
ZF’s cryptography work continued to push the ecosystem toward safer, more usable multisig: the team shipped a security-focused update in the FROST 2.2.0 Release, and the external review documented in FROST Demo Audit: frost-client and frostd validated the security posture and practical integration path for wallets. Together, these releases and audits underscore ZF’s ongoing investment in privacy-preserving, production-grade, independently validated open-source software—the kind of infrastructure work that compounds over time by making the network more robust, upgrade-ready, and trustworthy for the full ecosystem of users and integrators.
Throughout 2025, ZF continued to make transparency a cornerstone of our mission, reflecting our belief that open communication and accountability are essential to building public trust in privacy technology. Our quarterly reports, Q4 2024 Report, Q1 2025 Report, Q2 2025 Report, and Q3 2025 Report, provided detailed updates on financial stewardship, governance participation, community initiatives, and organizational progress. These reports serve as an evolving public record of how ZF operates: as an accountable steward of financial privacy infrastructure, a convener of community dialogue, and a transparent nonprofit working in service of the public good.
As we enter 2026, ZF remains focused on building robust software, fostering participatory governance, and scaling global engagement in ways that uphold privacy rights and digital autonomy. To the Zcash community—thank you for your collaboration, feedback, and shared belief in what privacy technology can enable. The best is yet to come.
