The $33.3 million Winklevoss Capital deal expands Cypherpunk’s ZEC strategy as it targets 5% ownership of the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply. Cypherpunk Technologies is expanding its footprint in the Zcash ecosystem, launching what it says is the world’s largest Zcash mining operation after acquiring a mining fleet from Winklevoss Capital, signaling growing institutional interest in the privacy-focused network. Cypherpunk said Tuesday that it acquired the fleet through an equity-based transaction valued at $33.33 million. The mining operation is already online at facilities across the United States, producing roughly 4.2 GSol/s, or about 18% of the Zcash network’s current hashrate. If the company’s figures are accurate, the transaction gives a single publicly traded company a significant share of Zcash’s mining capacity. Read more
Zcash researchers published more than 2,700 machine-checked theorems designed to rule out undetectable counterfeiting bugs in Ironwood. Zcash researchers have completed formal verification of Ironwood, publishing a machine-checked proof that the network’s new shielded pool does not contain undetectable counterfeiting bugs under its stated cryptographic assumptions. On Tuesday, Project Tachyon said that the proof, written in the Lean programming language, comprises over 2,700 theorems and took three teams of researchers and cryptographers over a month to complete. The work establishes a security property known as balance integrity, designed to ensure the shielded pool cannot pay out more value than has publicly entered it. The researchers said the proof covers the components needed for that property, including Ironwood’s zero-knowledge proof system, circuit rules and ledger-level accounting. It does not cover Ironwood’s separate privacy guarantees. Read more
Zcash’s next upgrade will replace the once-compromised Orchard pool and may offer clues about whether counterfeit tokens were created via a recent bug. Zcash’s Ironwood network upgrade, the solution to an “infinity” bug discovered in May on the privacy-focused blockchain’s main private transaction pool, Orchard, is set to go live on July 28. Announced in June, Ironwood closes the current Orchard pool, prevents new activity in it and sets up a new private pool. Funds leaving Orchard would have to pass through an accounting checkpoint before entering Ironwood, which could produce evidence about whether any counterfeit Zcash (ZEC) tokens were produced through the Orchard bug. “Zcash's Ironwood mainnet activation height has been set and tagged! All of the major organizations are committed to activation of NU6.3 at height 3428143, which is approximately July 28th at 8AM EST,” Zcash core developer Sean Bowe said on Thursday. Read more
Shielded Labs said exchanges, mining pools and wallets may need more time to complete Zcash’s Z3 software migration and safely prepare for Ironwood. Shielded Labs has raised the possibility of delaying Zcash's Ironwood network upgrade, warning that ecosystem participants like exchanges, mining pools and wallets may not have enough time to prepare their systems for the planned activation in late July. Jason McGee, executive director of Shielded Labs, said in a Zcash community forum post that two major projects are moving forward at the same time. Alongside Ironwood, infrastructure providers are being asked to replace Zcash’s longstanding node and wallet software, zcashd, with a new collection of tools known as the Z3 stack. The concerns highlight the trade-off between quickly restoring confidence in Zcash’s shielded supply and giving ecosystem participants enough time to deploy and audit the new infrastructure safely. Read more
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic's Mythos AI model found no further "serious bugs" in the privacy protocol following the patching of a previously discovered forgery bug. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said a security audit by Anthropic's Claude Mythos artificial intelligence model found no serious vulnerabilities in the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency's protocol. Requested by Shielded Labs, a Swiss-based non-profit supporting the development of Zcash, the AI security audit did not find “any more serious bugs” in the Zcash protocol, according to a Saturday X post by Wilcox. On June 3, Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a vulnerability in the shielded pool. Functionality was restored later that day through an emergency upgrade. Read more
Ironwood would close the old Orchard pool to new activity and route funds through a turnstile before they enter a new shielded pool. Zcash developers are proposing a new shielded pool called Ironwood after a recently patched bug raised concerns about whether counterfeit ZEC could have entered circulation unnoticed. The Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) said Saturday that it is working with Tachyon, Valar Group, the Zcash Foundation and Shielded Labs on the proposed network upgrade, which would add formal verification and independent audits to the Orchard protocol, a privacy system that lets users move ZEC without revealing transaction details. The proposal would close the current Orchard pool to new deposits and internal transactions, requiring funds to pass through a “turnstile,” which serves as an accounting checkpoint, before entering Ironwood. Read more
ETH price crashed below $1,600 as a vulnerability in Zcash emerged and Bitcoin sold off below $60,000 for the first time in months. Key takeaways: Ether (ETH) plummeted to a 13-month low of $1,540 on Friday, following the bearish trend across the broader cryptocurrency market. Traders now fear a deeper price correction, given weakness in ETH derivatives metrics and heightened risk after a bug was found in the Zcash blockchain. Read more
Zcash developers are weighing a new shielded pool and turnstile accounting after the Orchard bug raised supply verification questions. Zcash developers and researchers are discussing whether a new shielded pool could help restore supply verification confidence after a recently patched Orchard vulnerability. Shielded Labs, an independent Swiss-based Zcash support organization, said in a security update on Friday that it is exploring a proposed network upgrade that would deploy a new shielded pool and enforce “turnstile accounting” on coins moving from Orchard, giving users a clearer way to verify the integrity of funds moving out of the pool. The group said the proposal is still subject to further explanation and community review. Shielded Labs said it plans to publish a follow-up post next week explaining how the upgrade would work and what tradeoffs it could involve. Read more
Zcash Open Development Lab said the network briefly became unstable as miners upgraded, while the Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence of an exploit. Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a critical vulnerability in the privacy-focused blockchain’s latest shielded pool, then restored functionality through an emergency network upgrade. On Wednesday, the Zcash Foundation said the vulnerability affected Orchard’s zero-knowledge proof circuit and could have allowed invalid state transitions within the pool. However, the Foundation said there was no evidence that the bug was exploited, no unauthorized value creation was detected, and user privacy was not affected. The fix was carried out through a two-step emergency upgrade. Zebra 4.5.3 temporarily disabled Orchard actions, while Zebra 5.0.0 activated the NU6.2 upgrade to re-enable Orchard with a corrected circuit, according to the Foundation. Read more