The Zcash (ZEC) Network Was Down for Four Hours Today: Developers Issue an Urgent Statement

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency project Zcash ($ZEC) has made headlines due to a technical issue on its network. According to shared data, the Zcash network was unable to generate new blocks for more than four hours.

The outage occurred after developers released an emergency update the day before to address a critical vulnerability discovered in their Orchard protected trading pool. The Zcash team stated that the vulnerability was discovered during a routine security review and that no signs of exploitation have been found so far.

Zcash Developers Claim the Vulnerability Has Not Been Exploited by Hackers

On the other hand, the Zcash Foundation released versions 4.5.3 and 5.0.0 of the Zebra client to fix the critical Orchard bug. According to the foundation’s statement, Zebra version 4.5.3 temporarily disabled Orchard operations with an emergency soft fork performed in block 3,363,426 of the mainnet. Later, with Zebra version 5.0.0, the NU6.2 hard fork was enabled in block 3,364,600, and Orchard was made available again with the corrected structure.

Authorities stated that the vulnerability was detected before it could be exploited by any attacker, and that there was no evidence of unauthorized new $ZEC (Zero-Emission Control) creation on the network. User privacy was not affected, and Sapling and transparent transactions continued to function normally throughout the outage.

*This is not investment advice.