Zcash Jumps 10% Amid Most Consequential Network Upgrade in its History

Zcash is up 10% in the last 24 hours to $426 following what the founder of ZODL (Zcash Open Development Labs) Josh Swihart called the most consequential network upgrade in the coin’s history.

In a tweet, Swihart reflects on a defining moment for Zcash when he was informed of the issue that would lead to the remediation of the Orchard vulnerability and the rapid coordination of the most consequential network upgrade in Zcash history.

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.