If you recall from a few months ago, Zcash was all over the news for its price action.
- The entire team of Electric Coin Company (ECC), a key developer of Zcash, has resigned due to a dispute with the nonprofit Bootstrap.
- ECC's CEO, Josh Swihart, claims the team was forced to leave because of changes that made their work untenable.
- Bootstrap attributes the conflict to governance and legal issues, emphasizing compliance with nonprofit law.
Maybe that price action from before was a stress test of sorts.
Josh Swihart, CEO at ECC, wrote on X that a majority of Bootstrap’s board members — naming Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless and Michelle Lai (ZCAM) — had moved into “clear misalignment” with what he described as Zcash’s mission.
Swihart said ECC’s staff were “constructively discharged,” arguing that the terms of their employment had been changed in ways that made it impossible to do their jobs “effectively and with integrity.”
A constructive discharge is when employees quit because conditions are changed so severely that staying becomes unrealistic — even if they weren’t formally fired.
The ECC team is now forming a new company, Swihart said, adding that they remain committed to Zcash’s core goal: “building unstoppable private money.”
I hope that I am never "constructively discharged" from anything. It sounds pretty awful.
Does the new company just fork the old zcash chain, then? If so, interesting to see how their fate compares to Eth / Eth classic.
This is why decentralization is super important. Some people that always end up snaking their way into a position of power seem born to destroy dev teams. The ECC team is rather competent, from what I've seen.
I have been constructively discharged. It is not so bad.
That's essentially how I started working on my business full time. So it worked out well for me in the long term.
Essentially I was working a contract job and covering the Ontario region and they terminated the contract for the guy responsible for Western Canada and tried to put all his work and responsibility on me without any added benefit to me. Untenable so we agreed to part ways and not renew the contract.
Fortunately, I had my business which I had worked on for a number of years part time to fall back on and didn't have to accept their bs deal.
attack on bitcoin
Governance chaos kills trust fast and markets always see it first and when builders walk out it tells you something is seriously broken.
Yeah, in the cases I've seen, the management has created a nightmare so bad, the employee has no choice but to quit, which is why it gets deemed as a discharge. They were essentially pushed out. It's a bit like telling someone there job is to sit in a closet and do nothing all day. Makes people go batty.
Poor taste all around. The coin. The company name. Zhitty.