Critical double-spending vulnerability discovered in May 2026 in the Orchard shielded pool of the Zcash privacy cryptocurrency, and the coordinated emergency response of soft-fork mitigations and the NU6.2 network upgrade that resolved it without any exploitation or loss of funds.
Zcash (ZEC) plummeted approximately 40% after developers disclosed a critical four-year-old counterfeiting vulnerability in its Orchard shielded pool, discovered with help from Claude AI. Developers have proposed the Ironwood upgrade to restore independent supply verification, with ZEC partially recovering about 45% from lows.
Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash crashed 38% after Shielded Labs disclosed a critical bug in its Orchard shielded pool that could have enabled unlimited counterfeit token creation. The vulnerability, which went undetected for four years, was discovered through an AI-assisted audit using Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8.
Zcash developers executed a two-stage emergency fix after discovering a critical vulnerability in the Orchard shielded pool that could have enabled double-spending, temporarily suspending then restoring transactions through coordinated network upgrade.
