Zcash Crashed 50% On A Four-Year-Old Secret — The Recovery Has Quietly Begun
Zcash completed a two-phase emergency upgrade after a critical vulnerability was found in Orchard, its shielded pool. The flaw, present since May 2022, could theoretically have enabled unlimited undetectable counterfeit ZEC in the shielded pool, though no live-network inflation was confirmed and Zcash’s internal accounting showed no unauthorized value creation. Because Orchard is private, it cannot be proven whether the bug was exploited before the fix. The issue was discovered on May 29 by security researcher Taylor Hornby during an audit for Shielded Labs, using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and custom tools. Zcash first deployed an emergency soft fork to disable Orchard transactions, then a NU6.2 hard fork to patch the circuit and re-enable them. The disclosure triggered a sharp selloff, with ZEC falling about 50% from a June 4 high near $624 to $309 on June 5. After officials confirmed the network was secure, ZEC began recovering, trading around $430.
