ZEC▲$495.49 price jumped 16% after Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said an Orchard vulnerability was unlikely to have been exploited.
ZEC price rallied even as Zcash’s founder tried to separate a serious protocol bug from broader fears about the privacy crypto coin’s supply.
In an X post by Shielded Labs , Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox and Shielded Labs contributor Jason McGee said the recent Orchard vulnerability has mixed together several user concerns, from possible exploitation to whether the Zcash supply can still be independently verified.
Zcash trades at about $493 as of press time, up roughly 16% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
The Orchard pool, a shielded Zcash pool used for private transactions, was temporarily frozen after the vulnerability was found and later fixed. Per the latest update, prior exploitation is “unlikely,” though the team can’t completely exclude this possibility. The post reads:
“We believe prior exploitation is unlikely and therefore that legitimate Orchard funds are recoverable and the current supply of Zcash is sound […] However, users cannot currently verify that the Zcash supply is sound, and they should not have to rely on our assessment—or anyone else’s.”
Read also: Zcash Developers Finalize Ironwood Upgrade Plan. How Is ZEC Price Reacting?
Ironwood Upgrade Meant to Restore Supply Checks
The Ironwood upgrade is expected to stop the Orchard pool from functioning and thus prevent any further fund flows to and from the shielded address space.
The only remaining path would be out through the existing turnstile, which limits how much ZEC can leave Orchard to the amount that legitimately entered, the post reads.
The planned change will allow users to independently check whether Zcash’s supply limits are respected, the team said, noteing that Zcash was closely audited for similar bugs, including AI-assisted work with Anthropic’s unreleased Mythos model before it was suspended.
“So far, no more counterfeiting vulnerabilities have been identified,” they said, adding that “advanced AI-assisted analysis involved in this search gives us additional confidence that no similar vulnerabilities remain undiscovered.”
Read more: Zcash Price Crashes 45% After Infinite Minting Bug Disclosure
