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Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a critical vulnerability in the privacy-focused blockchain’s latest protected pool, then restored functionality through an emergency network upgrade.
On Wednesday, Zcash Foundation He said The vulnerability affected Orchard’s zero-knowledge proof circuit and could have allowed invalid state transitions within the cluster. However, the organization said there was no evidence of exploitation of the vulnerability, no unauthorized value creation was detected, and user privacy was not affected.
The fix was implemented through a two-step emergency upgrade. Zebra 4.5.3 temporarily disabled Orchard actions, while Zebra 5.0.0 activated the NU6.2 upgrade to re-enable Orchard with a patched circuit, according to the organization.
The emergency response shows how disruptions in core privacy infrastructure can require coordinated action across miners, exchanges, and node operators, even when user funds and total supply are not affected.
The upgrade also appears to have caused confusion across parts of the Zcash ecosystem. One Zcash block explorer Show Block 3,364,601 was most recently mined at 5:27 AM UTC, while the page listed it as having been mined about four hours earlier, prompting X to report a Zcash network crash.
Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) – Affiliate contributor Tatiana He said The network experienced a “brief period of instability” as miners upgraded and converged on new consensus rules. The post did not directly mention the block explorer or wallet issues, but said that network stability had been fully restored by 3:00 a.m. ET on June 2.
Cointelegraph reached out to ZCash for comment, but did not receive a response after publication.
Zcash Block Explorer displays the last block mined four hours ago. Source: Zcash Block Explorer
According to the Zcash Foundation, the vulnerability was discovered on May 29 by independent security researcher Taylor Hornby during an ongoing protocol audit of Shielded Labs. The problem was disclosed to ZODL’s core engineers, who confirmed it and began preparing remediation options.
The Zcash incident is causing confusion among community members
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana Infrastructure Helios, Disputed reports, saying the network was “not down” and that some explorer apps were connecting to a bad node.
A Zerodarts community member who goes by the pseudonym echoed this sentiment, Saying That “blocks are being mined” and that most block explorers need to update their nodes.
Related to: Zcash “running a bull market of its own” as ZEC price charts setting for 88% rally
However, Railgoon community member He said Zcash miners and developers froze the protected Orchard pool to patch the vulnerability before the hard fork. He said the network was “partially down on purpose” at the time, but has since recovered.
Zcash’s ZEC token briefly fell below $600 to $599 after hitting a daily high of $637, According to For CoinGecko data. However, it has recovered to $614 at the time of writing.
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