Talking about ZEC, it really has a touch of dark humor. A coin that champions "absolute privacy" ultimately got caught on the point of "no one can prove whether the vulnerability has been exploited."

First, look at the surface: the orchard protocol's elliptic curve constraint incomplete vulnerability, in simple terms, is a backdoor-level loophole left in the code, allowing attackers to conjure ZEC out of thin air, and it’s completely undetectable on-chain. The vulnerability has been lurking since May 2022, and it took nearly four years to be uncovered. Even more heartbreaking, the discoverer of this flaw wasn’t a top-tier security team but someone who wrote an exploit program using Claude Opus 4.8—AI hacking is indeed lowering the barrier.

But what truly caused the market to collapse wasn’t the vulnerability itself, but the backlash against Zcash’s privacy features. When a regular public chain has a vulnerability, you can trace, audit, and prove whether it has been stolen. Zcash doesn’t—its design makes it impossible to see anything. So now, no one can answer the most critical question: over the past four years, has this vulnerability been secretly exploited? No one knows, and it can never be proven cryptographically.

It’s like having a hole in your safe, but you don’t know if the contents have already been stolen. The rational approach is to assume it’s already been looted. That’s exactly how the market reacted—dropping 40% in a single day, nearly halving, which is entirely justified.

And then there’s the whale Garrett Jin, who built a short position of 57,460 ZEC around May 23, two weeks before it was publicly disclosed. The current unrealized profit is $16.48 million, ranking first on Hyperliquid’s profit leaderboard. If you say this was purely from technical analysis, I find it hard to believe. For a second-tier privacy coin like Zcash, with relatively shallow liquidity, daring to short so heavily at this time, the source of information is probably not from public reports. That two-week gap is too glaring.

Overall, this incident’s impact on ZEC isn’t just about price. It shakes a core assumption of privacy coins: that you can hold them with confidence because no one can see what you’re doing. Now, even holders can’t tell if the vulnerability has been exploited. This trust has cracked, and it’s hard to repair.

In the short term, there might be an oversold rebound, after all, the short positions are so crowded. But in the long run, Zcash’s selling point of “privacy unauditability” has turned into a fatal flaw. If the project can’t come up with at least a “auditable privacy” solution, this coin will basically only have speculative value left. As for that early shorting whale, all I can say is—this isn’t over yet.