Security researcher Taylor Hornby had disclosed the bug, which could, in theory, have allowed undetectable counterfeit ZEC, and developers moved to patch it through an emergency upgrade. No funds were stolen and no exploit occurred in the wild, but the disclosure was enough to trigger a rush for the exits.
NEAR and WLD give back their gainsWorldcoin’s WLD followed a similar arc on a compressed timeline as the token (issued by the iris-scanning identity project co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman) jumped roughly 60% recently, reaching about $0.55, before sliding back toward $0.40. The drop left WLD roughly 35% below its recent peak near $0.62.
Part of the attention surrounding the above tokens came from BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, whose Maelstrom fund had publicly backed all three before exiting. Hayes set a $10 price target on WLD and framed it as a liquid proxy for an AI and SpaceX listing trade, then disclosed selling the position days later, posting that the chart was “going in the wrong direction.”
The most pressing question now is whether each token holds its reset level. For ZEC, the test will be whether its post-patch rebound builds into a durable recovery or fades as traders weigh the reputational hit of a four-year-old bug in a flagship privacy pool. On the other hand, for NEAR and WLD, the focus will fall on whether the broader AI-token bid that lifted them in the first place returns.
Regardless, what the episode makes clear is that all three rallies were tightly tied to sentiment rather than fundamentals that shifted overnight. With the hype unwound, each token now faces the hard task of building a base without a viral narrative to carry it.
