Zcash Network Rumored Down, But Block Explorers Were the Problem

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency project Zcash (ZEC) made headlines on Monday after a viral tweet claimed the network had been unable to generate new blocks for more than four hours. The reality, however, was slightly less dramatic: Zcash itself was producing blocks just fine — it was the block explorers reading from out-of-date nodes that briefly misled the crypto internet.

The confusion stemmed from a "coordinated network upgrade" deployed to fix a critical vulnerability in Zcash's Orchard shielded pool. The bug had been discovered during a routine security review, according to the Zcash team, with no signs of exploitation detected. The fix was implemented in two stages between Monday and Wednesday. First, a soft fork disabled Orchard transactions because, as Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) explained, "a direct patch would have revealed too much information about the nature of the issue to anyone with access to the updated code." Then, a hard fork was rolled out to "remediate the vulnerability and fully restore Orchard functionality."

The Zcash Foundation released versions 4.5.3 and 5.0.0 of the Zebra client to address the bug. Zebra version 4.5.3 temporarily disabled Orchard operations with an emergency soft fork at block 3,363,426 of the mainnet. Later, Zebra version 5.0.0 enabled the NU6.2 hard fork at block 3,364,600, restoring Orchard with the corrected structure. The foundation emphasized that user privacy was not affected and that Sapling and transparent transactions continued to function normally throughout. ZODL also noted that there is "no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited" or of any unauthorized new $ZEC supply on the network.

The spark for the FUD came from X account Solid Intel, which claimed the network was "down" and hadn't produced blocks in four hours. The post gained over 180,000 views and was retweeted almost 100 times, with amplification in part to promote competitor Monero. Many in the crypto community immediately pushed back. Helius' Mert Mumtaz pointed out that Zcash was "not down in any way," directing people to a Zcash explorer showing normal network activity. Others urged users to "first verify before claiming a network is down" and mocked the lack of investigation. While the original tweet remained up without a correction, Solid Intel posted an update 45 minutes later clarifying that "block explorers, including the official explorer, still appear to be catching up after the upgrade."

The market shrugged off the rumors, with $ZEC up 10% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. Zcash's user privacy remains intact, developers insist, though the brief stalling of the official explorer served as a reminder that not every "network is down" claim survives a second look.

While Zcash caught heat for something it didn't do, Ink — Kraken's Ethereum layer-two network with approximately $230 million of TVL, per DeFiLlama — was busy dealing with a genuine outage. On Tuesday, the network's X account announced "chain-wide outages with intermittent network availability." Almost 24 hours later, an update explained the disruption stemmed from "a bug in OP-reth, one of the node clients used on the chain," with brief disruptions possible until a fix is deployed. Strangely, Ink's status page still notes "degraded performance" for Tuesday, even as the team claims a fix has already been implemented and results are being monitored.

The week has not been kind to chains. Last week, the Sui network experienced three separate downtime incidents, racking up a total of 15 hours of disruption in just two days — outages tied to a network upgrade and a subsequent rushed fix. Apparently, "the chain is live" remains an aspirational statement across the industry.