Zcash Foundation Patches Orchard Bug as ZEC Defies Market Slump

The Zcash Foundation has released an emergency Zebra upgrade to fix the bug that disrupted Orchard actions on the network. The ZEC price has surged amid this development, despite a broader crypto market downturn — a modest win for shielded-asset holders watching the rest of the charts bleed out.

Highlights:

• The Zcash Foundation announced it has released an emergency soft fork to fix the Orchard bug.
• The Foundation urged all node operators to upgrade to Zebra 5.0.0.
• The ZEC price is up amid this network upgrade, defying the broader crypto market trend.

Zcash Foundation Releases Zebra Upgrade To Address Network Bug In a blog post, the Foundation announced the release of Zebra 4.5.3 and Zebra 5.0.0 upgrades to address a critical bug in the Orchard Action circuit. They noted that 4.5.3 implemented an emergency soft fork that temporarily disabled Orchard actions while the team prepared the fix. Meanwhile, the 5.0.0 upgrade activated NU6.2, which re-enabled Orchard using the corrected circuit.

"We strongly urge all node operators to upgrade to Zebra 5.0.0 as soon as possible, or to 4.5.3 if you are unable to upgrade to 5.0.0 before the NU6.2 activation height," the Zcash Foundation stated.

They also provided an update on what the network vulnerability was about. The issue was a soundness bug in the implementation of the Orchard zero-knowledge (ZK) proof circuit in the halo2_gadgets crate. The Foundation further noted that in a ZK proof project like Zcash, soundness means the system should accept only valid transactions and state transitions. As such, this soundness vulnerability could have led to the system accepting a transaction it should otherwise reject.

"In this case, successful exploitation could have allowed the Orchard pool to accept invalid state transitions, potentially permitting double-spending of funds within Orchard, though with no ability to inflate the total ZEC supply, which is protected by Zcash's turnstile mechanism," the Foundation said.

No Known Exploitation Occurred The Zcash Foundation also confirmed that it discovered the vulnerability before any known exploitation occurred. The team further stated that there is no evidence of unauthorized value creation and that the network's turnstile mechanism confirmed the total supply remained intact throughout. The turnstile mechanism tracks the total ZEC balance across all value pools. The team also noted that user privacy was not affected and that sapling and transparent transactions continued to operate normally throughout the incident.

The ZEC price has rallied amid this fix to the network bug. The Zcash t