Electric Coin Company
Mission Statement
The mission at ECC is to empower economic freedom. Financial privacy is core to this endeavor, and essential to protect human dignity, security, self-sovereignty, and consent. Obtaining financial privacy should be easy â as easy as closing the curtains in your home. But with the emergence of Web2, power is deeply centralized, and those with control are already in your living room. You canât close the curtains. We must build something new. This new system of financial tools, accessible to everyone, will be user-friendly, fully private with options for disclosure, and its supporting infrastructure will be distributed and robust.
Zashi: iOS - Android - F-Droid
Built for Private Payments. Zashi is a self-custody shielded ZEC wallet for encrypted digital transactions.
Zashi is the perfect tool for onboarding friends and family into Zcash and private digital payments. Its intuitive design makes it easy for anyoneâeven those with no prior crypto experienceâto set up a wallet, get ZEC, and start transacting in minutes.
Integrations:
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Coinbase: crypto newbies can buy ZEC directly within the walletâskipping the hassles of account registration, KYC, and withdrawing coins from exchanges.
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Flexa: makes it simple to actually use ZEC, allowing new users to spend it at thousands of retail locations like Barnes & Noble, GameStop, and Chipotle.
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Keystone: a major breakthrough for the Zcash community that has been years in the making. This integration marks a significant evolution in Zcash usability by enabling cold storage of shielded ZEC.
Research and Development
The team have led recognised breakthroughs on several occasions, the first being the launch of Zcash as the worlds first commerical use of Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
Several more following such as the Sapling network upgrade allowing for lighter, shielded transactions with a time reduction of 90% for constructing transactions, and a memory reduction of over 97%, enabling for shielded transactions on a mobile device for the first time.
The most significant breakthrough being the most recent. The creation and deployment of the halo2 trustless proving system in Network Upgrade 5 for Zcash. This eliminated the trusted setup and launched a new era for Zcash. Since 2022, this has been active on the Zcash Mainnet and allows users to leverage a more secure & easily upgradeable construction for their payment protocol.
Collaboration & Partnerships
The ECC team supports and contributes to the Zcash ecosystem in many ways, collaborating with both internal & external teams regularly to help maintain and improve the Zcash protocol.
Partnerships include working with Gemini to enable shielded transactions on their platform, Flexa to enable easy Zcash mobile payments at retal locations, hardware wallet companies like Keystone to enable shielded cold storage of ZEC, Brave for Zcash support in the browser, & other teams in the Zcash ecosystem to bring imrovements to Zcash.
ECC is also a proud sponsor of PGPforCrypto a meeting series that brings together professionals, enthusiasts, and experts in the cryptocurrency space to discuss developments, share insights, and foster community engagement. PGPforCrypto is led by Board Member and VP of Strategic Alliances at Electric Coin Co, Paul Brigner.
Policy & Regulation
ECCs insight and leadership around on-chain privacy and its implications for personal and national security is incredibly valuable for policy makers. Consistent efforts to appropriately guide policy wherever possible have been made since the ECC was founded.
Examples of outreach include dialogue with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) taking part in meetings which resulted in the organizations recommendations for the cryptocurrency sector. As a result of these efforts Zcash became approved by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), the only privacy-protecting cryptocurrency to do so.
Organizational Structure
The Electric Coin Company is wholly owned by the Bootstrap Project. The Bootstrap Project is a 501(c)(3) dedicated to the uplift of humanity through technology, scientific discovery, education and human organization. Both Bootstrap and the Electric Coin Company have a board of directors, and the Electric Coin Company also has a Scientific Advisory Group.
Funding
Funding, use of finances, & other related info can be found in the Transparency Reports on their blog .