On May 29, security researcher Taylor Hornby disclosed a critical bug in Zcash's Orchard shielded pool. The flaw, present since Orchard launched on May 31, 2022, would allow an attacker to generate counterfeit $ZEC within the pool without leaving any visible on-chain signature. Hornby found it using Anthropic's Opus 4.8 model, running inside a custom audit-agent framework he built.
Zcash rebounds
Zcash rebounded after hitting a low of $250 on June 5. At a current price of $426, Zcash is up 70% from this low after developers proposed a fix for a critical counterfeiting bug in its privacy-focused Orchard pool.
Shielded Labs, the Zcash Foundation, and ZODL proposed Ironwood, an upgrade that would launch a new shielded pool. Anyone running a node could then sum balances across pools and verify the supply is correct.
The Ironwood proposal would move users to a new, repaired privacy pool and let anyone running Zcash software verify that no more than the correct amount of $ZEC exists.
Zcash ships core updates
According to Swihart, Zcash shipped core updates including the emergency NU6.2 network upgrade (zcashd v6.20.0) at mainnet block 3364600 (carried out at 03:00 UTC, Wednesday, June 3), remediating the privately disclosed Orchard circuit flaw in halo2_gadgets.
A parallel time-critical zcashd v6.12.5 was also shipped in coordination with a soft fork at mainnet block 3363426 (carried out at 02:00 UTC, Tuesday, June 2), fixing a Coinbase value-balance desync that could crash nodes on a single valid proof-of-work block and temporarily turning off Orchard actions until NU6.2 activated.
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