Zcash has stopped producing blocks for over 4 hours! After an emergency fork, the height is stuck at 3,364,601, worsening the governance crisis.

Zcash’s network stopped producing blocks at 05:27:48 UTC on the 3rd at block height 3,364,601, with no new blocks produced for more than 4 hours. The incident broke out after an emergency coordination upgrade (soft fork) yesterday (the 2nd), when the development team had just patched a major vulnerability in the Orchard shielded pool. Coupled with the collective departure of ECC core developers earlier this year, Zcash faces the dual pressures of vulnerability remediation and a governance vacuum.
(Background: The 12-fold surge of ZEC—behind it, BTC mining pools collectively holding the arrangement)
(Additional context: After ZEC surged 1460%—reassessing the value foundation of Zcash)

Table of Contents

Toggle

• Aftershocks after the emergency fork
• Hash power concentration—mining pool disconnection is the key
• Governance vacuum

The privacy coin Zcash network stopped producing blocks at 6/3 in Taiwan time in the morning at block height 3,364,601. Under normal conditions, Zcash produces one block approximately every 75 seconds; a 4-hour shutdown means nearly 200 blocks’ worth of delay, and on-chain transactions are completely frozen.

Aftershocks after the emergency fork

Right the day before (around 02:00 UTC on 6/2), Zcash had already initiated an emergency coordination upgrade at block height 3,363,426.

The trigger was a critical vulnerability found in the Orchard shielded pool during an audit commissioned by independent security researcher Taylor Hornby from Shielded Labs on 5/29. Miners immediately paused all Orchard-related transactions, and the Orchard functionality was down for about 24 hours.

The first phase was a soft fork; the second phase is expected to update the zero-knowledge proof circuits via a hard fork, fully restoring Orchard functionality. The Zcash team also notified other protocol maintainers using Orchard, though the potential scope of impact has not yet been fully clarified.

During the period when the vulnerability was disclosed and repaired, ZEC briefly surged above $600, and interpretations of the event in the market have already diverged.

Hash power concentration—mining pool disconnection is the key

The direct cause of the halted block production points to a failure in mining pool coordination. Four mining pools—Foundry, ViaBTC, F2Pool, and Antpool—collectively control more than 81.6% of ZEC’s hash power.

Foundry launched its institutional Zcash mining pool only in April this year. After going live, it quickly captured nearly one-third of the new issuance. In a scenario where hash power is highly concentrated, a single point of failure can easily form during emergency upgrades. If major pools diverge on version updates or block parameters, the entire chain must wait for them to re-align.

Governance vacuum

Beyond technical issues, in January 2026, ECC (Electric Coin Company)’s core development team collectively resigned. Josh Swihart publicly accused the Bootstrap board of deviating from Zcash’s original mission, and ZEC fell by more than 20% in a single day at the time. The developers who left went on to start new ventures, but whether the new architecture can effectively coordinate mining pools and protocol upgrades during a crisis can be examined by the consequences after this block halt.