Engineer Who Discovered the Security Flaw That Caused a 50% Drop in Zcash Price Now Says He Is Researching a New Altcoin

Taylor Hornby, the security engineer behind the critical security vulnerability recently discovered in Zcash, has announced plans to expand audit efforts.

Hornby announced that it will add Monero (XMR) and other privacy-focused networks to its list of projects under investigation as part of its security research into privacy-oriented cryptocurrency projects.

On May 29, Hornby, while working on a security project commissioned by the non-profit development organization Shielded Labs, discovered a critical vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard privacy repository. The vulnerability had been present on the network since May 2022 and could theoretically allow for the production of an unlimited amount of counterfeit ZEC.

Another noteworthy aspect was that Hornby utilized the Claude Opus 4.8 AI model developed by Anthropic in his research process. The vulnerability discovered through AI-powered auditing techniques triggered an urgent update process in the Zcash ecosystem, and the project developers quickly resolved the issue.

Solana developer Mert Mumtaz also recently stated that security vulnerabilities similar to those in Zcash could potentially exist in all privacy tokens.

*This is not investment advice.