Zcash was rumored to have stopped working – then it became crypto’s only winner
Zcash briefly faced a market scare when block explorers seemed to show the network had stopped producing blocks, but developers said the chain never went offline. The apparent outage was caused by explorers using stale or unpatched nodes after an emergency upgrade. In reality, miners kept producing blocks and transactions kept confirming. The issue stemmed from a soundness vulnerability in Orchard, Zcash’s main shielded privacy pool. Developers used an emergency soft fork to temporarily disable Orchard transactions, then activated NU6.2, a hard fork that restored Orchard with a corrected circuit. The flaw could have enabled double-spending inside Orchard, but Zcash’s 21 million coin supply cap remained intact and privacy was not affected for Sapling or transparent transactions. Despite the scare, ZEC rose about 10% near $620 while Bitcoin and Ethereum fell more than 4%, suggesting traders viewed the bug as contained and fixed before exploitation.
