ZEC Price Jumps as Largest-Ever Zcash-Focused Funding Round Closes

• ZEC was among the day’s highest gainers after the Zcash Open Development Lab closed a $25 million funding round led by a16z crypto and Coinbase.
• The crypto’s bearish bias is easing as the price trends towards a descending resistance trend line that dates back to late November.

ZODL, one of the main groups behind the development of the Zcash privacy technology, has raised $25 million in a recent round, pushing ZEC’s price over 8% in the past day.

ZEC trades at $228.3 after a rapid rise in the past day, with trading volume surging 36% to $364 million. Its $3.77 billion market cap ranks 26th in the market. Over the past day, only KAIA, Hyperliquid’s HYPE and Jupiter’s JUP gained more among the top 100 crypto projects by market cap.

ZEC is trending toward a descending resistance trendline that has been in place since late November, connecting the crypto’s seven-year high of $699 with its resurgence to $540 in early January.. The RSI has also been on the rise and hit 45 earlier today, indicating that sellers are losing their hold on the market.

ZODL Raises $25 Million to Expand Zcash Development

Meanwhile, ZODL said that the $25 million round signifies strong investor confidence in the growing global adoption of Zcash and its privacy technology.

As CNF reported, ZODL (Zcash Open Development Lab) is a new company rebranded from Zashi, one of the most popular ZEC wallets. The rebrand came after several members of the Electric Coin Company (ECC) had a dispute with Bootstrap and the Zcash Foundation and left to chart their own development journey. Led by former ECC CEO Josh Swihart, the team said that the other parties had made it difficult to work on the network’s technical infrastructure, but pledged to keep building under ZODL, a message reiterated in the latest announcement.

ZODL raised the money from leading venture firms, including a16z Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Ventures and Maelstrom, the venture vehicle led by former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes. Individual contributors to the round included ex-Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Dragonfly Capital’s Haseeb Qureshi,  and James Nicholas, the founder of Solana-based staking service Helius.

ZODL says developing the future of private money remains the core part of the team’s work. It added that the engineers who developed and maintained most of the Zcash protocol’s technology have joined the team, making it one of the most important pillars of the network.

“The team’s approach to protocol evolution is grounded in usability, ensuring technical advances support real demand and drive product-market fit for Zcash,” it added.

ZODL will use the new funding to grow its operations, including bringing in new talent to its engineering team.  It says that its products remain the most popular in the network, claiming the ZODL wallet has processed over $600 million in swaps since October last year.