About $80 million ZEC crosses into Zcash’s new ‘Ironwood’ pool in the first day

About 176,000 $ZEC, worth roughly $81 million, had migrated into Zcash’s new Ironwood shielded pool by Wednesday, a day after the upgrade activated and sealed the pool where a counterfeiting flaw had gone undetected for four years.

That is roughly 5% of the 3.66 million $ZEC held in Orchard at activation. Orchard’s balance has since fallen to about 3.51 million, with around 46,000 $ZEC crossing over in the past 24 hours, according to the Ironwood migration tracker.

Zcash holds funds in separate compartments called pools, each one a generation of the network’s privacy technology. The transparent pool works like bitcoin, with every balance and transaction visible on the chain, and holds about 12.5 million $ZEC.

The shielded pools hide amounts and participants. Sapling, introduced in 2018, holds about 582,000 $ZEC, and Orchard, which arrived in 2022 and was the newest until this week, held about 3.5 million. Each time the network upgrades its privacy cryptography, it opens a new pool rather than rebuilding the old one, leaving holders to move their coins across themselves.

Orchard can no longer take deposits. Every coin still inside has to leave through the turnstile, the accounting rule that caps total withdrawals at the amount verifiably deposited, so the pool’s balance can now only fall.

Migration is voluntary, so the timeline depends on how quickly holders, wallets, and exchanges move funds. For now, the bulk of Zcash’s private supply sits in a pool that has been closed to new money since Tuesday.