Alex Bornstein
Alex Bornstein is an American nonprofit executive who serves as the Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation, a United States–based organization that supports the privacy-focused Zcash cryptocurrency and its underlying protocol.[1][5]
Early Career and Education
Bornstein holds a Bachelor of Science from Charter Oak State College.[1] Before his work in the cryptocurrency sector, he held a senior operations role in the nonprofit food-security field, serving as Chief Operations Officer at the Vermont Foodbank from January 2014 to January 2016.[1]
Zcash Foundation
The Zcash Foundation is the nonprofit associated with Zcash, a cryptocurrency built around shielded, privacy-preserving transactions. Bornstein's tenure there spans several roles across general management, and his work has centered on operations, protocol development coordination, and humanitarian applications of financial privacy.[5][1]
Chief Operating Officer
Bornstein was Chief Operating Officer of the Zcash Foundation from January 2021 to January 2025.[1] During this period he engaged with the wider Zcash community; in March 2022 he described attending a Zcash Foundation Twitter Spaces session held with The Tor Project and Zcash Community Grants, relaying a remark from a Tor representative named Nick that "anonymity loves company" and observing that broader adoption of anonymity tools benefits everyone within that shared pool.[1]
Interim Leadership and Appointment as Executive Director
Bornstein took on the role of interim Executive Director beginning in March 2025, before being formally appointed Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation.[3][4][2] The appointment was announced on November 3, 2025, and his profile records the Executive Director role as beginning in November 2025.[2][1]
Reflecting on his roughly four years as COO and his interim tenure, Bornstein reported several accomplishments achieved during that period. He stated that the Foundation had accelerated development of Zebra — a Zcash node implementation written in the Rust programming language — and delivered performance improvements to it.[2] He also said the Foundation had launched the Shielded Aid Initiative to apply privacy-preserving technology to humanitarian aid and cash-distribution programs, and had strengthened its relationships with other key Zcash organizations to encourage a more collaborative and aligned approach across the ecosystem.[2]
