Zcash (ZEC) rose about 45% from a low near $300 on Friday and traded around $437 on Monday, based on the reported price points for those days. These levels represent the price movement between the end of the week and the start of the following week. Despite the change from Friday to Monday, the token’s price remained down roughly 22% over the week.
A significant counterfeiting bug was discovered in Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool. This flaw could have enabled attackers to create unlimited counterfeit Zcash (ZEC) and withdraw these fake tokens from the shielded pool. Alarmingly, the vulnerability had existed undetected since 2022. In response to this critical issue, a swift and coordinated effort was undertaken by Shielded Labs, the Zcash Foundation, and the Zcash Open Development Lab. These organizations worked together with mining pools ViaBTC and Foundry to implement emergency network upgrades. The patches to fix the vulnerability were deployed within days, highlighting the urgent nature of the threat and the effective collaboration between these entities to safeguard the Zcash ecosystem.
On June 6, Zcash developers proposed the Ironwood upgrade to restore users’ ability to confirm the coin’s supply is sound. The proposal calls for creating a new privacy pool that uses the repaired Orchard code and for blocking the creation of new coins in the old Orchard pool. Once activated, Ironwood would allow users to add up balances across pools and confirm that no more than the correct amount of ZEC exists, and users would not have to trust the developers’ word or wait for funds to migrate. The plan could also reveal whether the counterfeiting bug that had been undetected since 2022 was ever abused. As users move coins out of the old pool, counterfeit ZEC would be exposed when it tried to leave or be stranded and destroyed.
Chamath Palihapitiya described Ironwood as a way for ‘anyone running a node to tally the balances across pools and “verify the supply is clean.”‘ There is no firm timeline for the upgrade and development could take longer than expected.
