Zcash Fixes Critical Orchard Vulnerability As ZEC Holds $600 Support
Zcash patched a critical soundness bug in the Orchard shielded pool that could have allowed invalid state transitions and double-spending inside Orchard, though not inflation of the total ZEC supply. Researcher Taylor Hornby found and disclosed the issue on May 29, prompting a private emergency response from developers, miners, and infrastructure operators. A first soft-fork attempt ran into problems, but a revised fix activated on June 2 and temporarily disabled Orchard transactions. The network then completed the NU6.2 hard fork on June 3, restoring Orchard with corrected code. Zcash said there is no evidence the flaw was exploited and no impact on overall supply or fund privacy. Social media reports of the network being “down” were attributed to block explorers syncing with upgrading nodes, not a chain failure. ZEC rose sharply during the incident.
