ZEC rebounds 45%! The Zcash development team confirms the Ironwood upgrade launching in July, with a new privacy pool replacing the vulnerable Orchard

The Zcash development team ZODL, together with Shielded Labs, Tachyon, Valar Group, and the Zcash Foundation, has completed consensus rule changes for the Ironwood upgrade, planned to be activated at the end of July after block height 3,417,100. The new upgrade will create an entirely new privacy transaction pool to replace the vulnerable Orchard pool, with a triple line of defense: formal verification, independent audits, and AI-assisted security reviews. Since last Friday’s low, ZEC has rebounded 45% from about $300 to around $437.
(Background: ZEC crashed 48% and broke below $250: Opus 4.8 uncovered Zcash’s infinite minting vulnerability, and Arthur Hayes liquidated and walked away.)
(Additional background: Hornby, who found Zcash’s four-year vulnerability, says Monero is already on the audit list.)

One week after the exposure of the Orchard shielded pool’s infinite minting vulnerability, the Zcash development team has chosen to directly develop a new privacy pool.

The Zcash development team ZODL, in coordination with Shielded Labs, Tachyon, Valar Group, and the Zcash Foundation, announced that they have completed the consensus rule changes for the Ironwood upgrade, which is expected to be activated after support for zcashd ends (block height 3,417,100) at the end of July.

The core logic of Ironwood is to use patched code to build a brand-new privacy transaction pool while locking the old Orchard pool. Once the upgrade is enabled, anyone running a node can verify through consensus rules that the circulating supply of ZEC has not been inflated. This is the one sentence the market most wants to hear since the Orchard vulnerability was exposed.

Fake coins will “walk into the trap”

In terms of the specific mechanism, Ironwood sets a “flag bit” between the new and old Orchard pools, restricting the old pool from receiving any new transactions and allowing only the generation of change. In other words, the old pool will only send out and not receive.

Paired with Zcash’s existing turnstile mechanism (an on-chain accounting system that tracks, per pool, the amount of ZEC in and out), any attempt to move out of the old pool more ZEC than what was legally deposited will be directly rejected. Developers describe the effect of this design as that any counterfeit ZEC hidden in the old pool will not show itself during migration—it will stay trapped there and be “effectively destroyed” for good.

The wallet experience is relatively smooth. Existing Orchard addresses remain valid, and wallets that support Ironwood will provide a one-click migration feature. Valar Group also developed a wrapper to give users who are still using the older zcashd wallet version a buffer period.

The market has responded quite positively. After the vulnerability was exposed, ZEC briefly plunged 48% to touch around $250. It then revisited a low around $300 last Friday, but after the Ironwood proposal was published, it rebounded about 45% within two days. As of the time of this release, it is around $461.