MarketsShareShare this articleCopy linkX (Twitter)LinkedInFacebookEmailZcash Surges 45% Following Ironwood Upgrade Proposal by Developers
The Ironwood initiative aims to allow verification that no counterfeit coins are in circulation, addressing a recently patched bug that led to last week's market dip. ZEC remains down about 22% for the week.
By Shaurya Malwa|Edited by Omkar GodboleUpdated Jun 8, 2026, 8:17 a.m. Published Jun 8, 2026, 8:10 a.m. 2 min readMake preferred on
Key Points:
- Zcash has seen a rebound of approximately 45% from last week’s low following a proposal to fix a serious counterfeiting issue in its privacy-oriented Orchard pool.
- The Ironwood proposal aims to transition users to a new, corrected privacy pool and allows anyone running Zcash software to verify the accurate amount of ZEC in circulation.
- As coins transition from the old pool, any counterfeit ZEC would either be detected or rendered unusable, potentially indicating if the flaw had been exploited, though developers assert that such abuse is unlikely.
Zcash has managed to recover a significant portion of its losses from the previous week, climbing about 45% from the low of roughly $300 it reached last Friday following the announcement of a fix for the bug that caused the market downturn.
On Monday, ZEC was trading around $437 according to CoinDesk data, despite still being down about 22% for the week. The token's price dropped sharply after Shielded Labs, a nonprofit developer, revealed a critical counterfeiting bug in Zcash's Orchard pool, which is responsible for concealing transaction details.
This undetected flaw, present since 2022, had the potential to allow an attacker to generate infinite fake ZEC unnoticed and withdraw tokens from the protocol’s shielded pool, which offers optional privacy.
Developers, including Shielded Labs, the Zcash Foundation, and the Zcash Open Development Lab, quickly addressed the issue through emergency network upgrades, working in coordination with mining pools ViaBTC and Foundry. On June 6, these groups put forward the Ironwood proposal, designed to restore users' ability to verify the integrity of the coin supply.
The Ironwood initiative would establish a new privacy pool with the corrected code while preventing the creation of new coins in the old Orchard pool. Once implemented, any user running Zcash software could aggregate balances across pools and confirm that no more than the correct amount of ZEC exists.
This means users would not need to rely solely on the developers' assurances or wait for the migration of funds.
Additionally, the plan may help determine if the bug was ever exploited. As users move coins out of the old pool, any counterfeit ZEC would either be revealed during the process or left stranded and destroyed. Shielded Labs has indicated that it believes exploitation was unlikely.
The proposal has garnered interest beyond the Zcash community. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya discussed Ironwood in his latest newsletter, highlighting it as a method for anyone operating a node to verify the balances across pools and "ensure the supply is clean."
Developers have yet to provide a specific timeline for the upgrade, noting that the work required for building, testing, and coordinating the implementation across the network may take longer than anticipated.
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