Analyst Kyle du Plessis stated that ZEC needs to reclaim the $530 level to prove the vulnerability was never exploited.
- Zcash’s Ironwood upgrade goes live on Tuesday, replacing the Orchard shielded pool after a 60-day development sprint.
- The upgrade introduces a new verifiable shielded pool with audit mechanisms designed to address a soundness flaw.
- The launch caps a broader overhaul of Zcash’s infrastructure, including a new node stack and the retirement of the legacy zcashd software.
The Zcash (ZEC) Ironwood upgrade is expected to go live on Tuesday, but the momentum has not lifted the cryptocurrency.
ZODL Executive Director Josh Swihart on Monday announced that the update will be live around 9 AM Eastern Time (ET), replacing the soundness-flawed Orchard shielded pool since 2022. He called the update a “wartime mode,” and said 51 developers wrote the code, merging 1,391 pull requests, with no weekends off in 60 days.
A Decade Later, Built From Scratch
Swihart said the team retired the legacy zcashd node after a decade and rebuilt the stack from scratch, with new wallets including Zallet, Zebra, and Zakura, hardened infrastructure, and mobile SDKs across iOS and Android.
Fourteen engineers from ZODL accounted for half of the merged changes and 82% of the updates to protocol and wallet repos, according to Swihart.
“Many people are working not for personal glory or price charts, but because this work is so important. Freedom isn’t free; it must be constructed,” Swihart said on X.
He stated that the Ironwood upgrade will create a new verifiable pool, with a turnstile mechanism to allow anyone to audit that the supply matches legitimate deposits, and the old Orchard pool becomes withdrawal-only.
$530 Is The Level To Watch
ZEC’s price was down 0.5% in the last 24 hours, in contrast with the broader crypto market, which edged higher as Bitcoin (BTC) stayed around $64,612. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around ZEC remained in the ‘bearish’ zone, while chatter around it stayed at ‘low’ levels over the past day.
The Ironwood upgrade could answer the question of whether the bug was ever exploited to mint counterfeit ZEC, crypto analyst Kyle du Plessis said on X. If ZEC went for $530, it would indicate the market felt there was no exploitation, but if it stayed below or rejected the level, downside risk remained, according to him.
Hayes Still On The Sidelines
In early June, founder of the recently shut down BitMEX exchange, Arthur Hayes, sold his entire ZEC holding after the bug went public. The ZEC vulnerability would have enabled an attacker to mint fake ZEC within the pool without detection, and had existed since Orchard launched in 2022. It went unnoticed for almost 4 years, which caused Hayes to liquidate his holdings. He wrote that exploitation was “extremely unlikely,” but that the impossibility could not be proven, and that privacy-focused assets needed “perfection, not improbability.”
Read also: Bitcoin Heads Into Fed Week With Least Downside Protection Since June, Bitfinex Analysts Say
For updates and corrections, email newsroom[at]stocktwits[dot]com<