AI · Decrypt
Zcash Ironwood Upgrade Nears as Developers Work to Restore Confidence After ZEC Crash
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In a series of posts on the Zcash forum on Thursday, developers said the privacy-focused cryptocurrency's Ironwood upgrade is moving closer to activation—first on a testnet—bringing the network a step nearer to allowing users to verify the integrity of its circulating supply following last month's disclosure of a critical counterfeiting vulnerability.
Key facts
- The panic around the vulnerability disclosure led to a massive price drop for the coin, which lost more than half of its value in a matter of two days, falling from more than $600 to a recent bottom
- The update comes weeks after security researcher Taylor Hornby, using Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, uncovered a four-year-old flaw in Zcash's Orchard shielded pool that could have allowed unlimited
- At Shielded Labs their focus has been security, and in particular their new project, which they are calling Zero, of supporting enterprise users (e.g
- Although developers patched the bug on June 1, Zcash's privacy features meant there was no cryptographic way to determine whether it had ever been exploited, which led Zcash developers to propose
Summary
Work continues on a formal proof of soundness ahead of the network upgrade. Shielded Labs says migrating exchanges, wallets, and mining pools to new software remains the biggest deployment challenge. Announced in June, Ironwood is a proposed Zcash network upgrade that introduces a new shielded pool and accounting system designed to let anyone verify the network's circulating supply while preserving transaction privacy. The upgrade is intended to eliminate the uncertainty exposed by the Orchard vulnerability in May, which left developers unable to prove whether counterfeit ZEC had ever been created.