Zcash Finalizes Ironwood Security Upgrade Targeting Late July to Fix Critical Orchard Vulnerability

Zcash developers have finalized a series of consensus rule changes for the Ironwood upgrade targeting late July 2026, following the discovery of a critical vulnerability in the Orchard shielded pool that could have enabled unlimited counterfeit ZEC creation. According to developer Sean Bowe, Ironwood will introduce a new shielded pool and use a special flag to disable payments in the existing Orchard pool while routing new transactions to the newly created pool. The upgrade will leverage Zcash's turnstile mechanism to maintain a verifiable bound on the circulating supply.

ZEC rebounded sharply on the upgrade progress, gaining more than 10% over the past 24 hours and trading near $470 at press time, recovering from an earlier selloff that saw the token plunge over 50% to around $303 following the vulnerability disclosure.