Zcash Fixes Critical Orchard Vulnerability As ZEC Holds $600 Support

Zcash has patched a dangerous vulnerability in its privacy-focused infrastructure that could have enabled double-spending, deploying an emergency network upgrade to prevent exploitation.

According to the report, Zcash researcher Taylor Hornby, who is conducting an ongoing protocol audit on behalf of Shielded Labs, discovered a critical soundness vulnerability in the Orchard zero-knowledge proof circuit on May 29 and disclosed the issue to Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) core engineers that same day.

“A soundness vulnerability is one that could allow the system to accept something it should reject. In this case, successful exploitation could have allowed the Orchard pool to accept invalid state transitions, potentially permitting double-spending of funds within Orchard, though with no ability to inflate the total ZEC supply, which is protected by Zcash’s turnstile mechanism,” the foundation explained.

After identifying the vulnerability, Zcash developers, miners, and infrastructure operators coordinated privately to prepare a fix, keeping details confidential to avoid potential exploits.

Following the upgrade, news that the network was offline circulated on social media, creating confusion among community members. Some reports claimed that Zcash had failed to produce blocks for over four hours.

“What actually happened: Zcash pushed a coordinated network upgrade (NU6.2) that required all node operators to update. During that transition, some block explorers, including ours, showed stale or missing data while we upgraded,” the post stated.

“That’s the explorer being out of sync, not the blockchain being broken. Important distinction. (…) Block explorers are just readers. They pull data from a node, parse it, and display it. If the node is upgrading or resyncing, the explorer goes stale,” the explorer continued.

After failing to reclaim the $630 local resistance, the cryptocurrency dropped toward the $600 support, briefly falling below it before bouncing again. As of this writing, Zcash trades at $612, a 9.5% increase in the weekly timeframe.