Zcash has crashed 50% after a critical vulnerability was discovered in its Orchard shielded pool. The flaw, present for four years, could have allowed unlimited counterfeit ZEC creation.
CEO Josh Swihart of Electric Coin Company confirmed the fix on June 7, as ZEC began recovering from lows of $309 on June 5.
The vulnerability was found on May 29 by security researcher Taylor Hornby using Anthropic's AI model. A proof-of-concept generated unlimited counterfeit ZEC in a test environment. The Orchard pool's privacy features make it impossible to cryptographically prove the flaw was never exploited on the live network.
The response was swift: an emergency soft fork on June 2 disabled Orchard transactions, followed by the NU6.2 hard fork on June 3 that patched the flaw. The market initially rallied to $624 on June 4 before crashing, partly due to Arthur Hayes exiting his position. ZEC now trades around $430 as confidence slowly rebuilds.