New Zcash nonprofit Sovright unveils ZEC wallet recovery tool

Sovright, the non-profit successor organization to Zcash R&D firm Electric Coin Company, released a new wallet tool called Argos that will enable early Zcash users recover funds that became stuck after the old ZEC Wallet Lite stopped being maintained in 2022, according to an announcement shared with The Block.

Michelle Lai, executive chairman of Sovright and longtime Zcash community member, said the solution, dubbed Argos, will enable users who still have their old wallet seed phrases to recover their funds, called Argos.

While Lai said Sovright is unable to confirm how many addresses were affected, because the issue only affected particular shielded addresses, the amount estimated to have been lost was “significant” and largely affected early and long-time Zcash adopters. 

"To us, it's important that we take care of our users, of people who believe, our community," Lai, who often goes by sudo_ml online, told The Block. "So to the extent we were aware that we had the necessary skills to do it and it wouldn't take up like six months to build it, we thought it would be important to do."

Argos is one of several efforts the newly reformed Sovright organization is targeting to help improve longstanding issues in the Zcash community. Last week, for instance, the firm launched the privacy-preserving Sovright Mining Pool in testnet to help individual miners diversify Zcash’s highly concentrated hashrate.

"We call these kinds of problems ‘potholes:' the long-overlooked issues that frustrate users, create friction, and quietly erode trust over time. They're not glamorous, but they're often important problems to solve. Sovright was created to tackle exactly these kinds of challenges. strengthening the ecosystem in a variety of ways," Lai said in a release. 

Sovright

Sovright today is just three people who joined from the former Zcash-focused non-profit called Bootstrap. This includes Lai, Zaki Manian, a serial blockchain entrepreneur perhaps best known for his contributions to Zcash and Cosmos, and Manian’s long-time collaborator Christina Garman, who is focused on product development at Sovright.

All were former Bootstrap board members.

Bootstrap itself was the nonprofit that governed Electric Coin Company, the primary company that created and launched Zcash in 2016. Earlier this year, following a governance dispute between ECC employees and the Bootstrap board, every staff member of ECC quit to form a for-profit company called Zcash Open Development Lab, or ZODL.

Lai declined to go into specifics about the split, but noted there were "constraints of the law" that limited a direction ECC wanted to take. ZODL CEO Josh Swihar previously told The Block that there were plans to monetize parts of the Zcash protocol, including the Zashi wallet, which was created in 2024.

"You know, as we kind of stood in the aftermath of what happened, there was a question of how do we reboot this organization between us or among us," Lai said, noting that Sovright has the "responsibility of ensuring that all the funds that were accumulated and the legacy of the organization continues to be a positive one."

"We had the ability to start thinking about rebuilding. We started with nothing. We had no email, no Slack," she added.

Lai said there are no hard feelings at Sovright at ZODL, which recently raised $25 million from organizations like Paradigm and a16z and is which is focused on Zcash products, like the Zodl wallet, which is based on the popular Zashi wallet codebase.

“We like them. We really like the wallet,” Lai said. “There are a lot of people there that for many years, they're highly respected individuals.”