Market Pulse: Zcash Price Climbs 13% in a Week as Network Preps Ironwood Upgrade

Across major exchanges, zcash developers are closing in on a July 21 mainnet launch for Ironwood, a network upgrade built to let any node operator verify the coin’s circulating supply on day one.

The upgrade traces back to a discovery on May 29.

Security researcher Taylor Hornby, working under contract for Shielded Labs, found a soundness flaw inside the Orchard shielded pool’s elliptic curve code.

The bug lived in a piece of the halo2_gadgets crate handling point multiplication.

A prover could swap in the wrong base point and still get the circuit to accept an invalid proof.

That flaw mattered because Orchard hides sender, receiver and amount by design.

A counterfeit note created inside the pool would look identical to a real one.

The bug had sat in the code since Orchard went live in May 2022 as part of the NU5 upgrade.