- Zcash price crashed more than 40% after the disclosure of a critical Orchard shielded pool vulnerability that remained undetected for nearly four years.
- A symmetrical triangle pattern in the daily chart leads the long-term sideways trend in the ZEC price.
- An emergency soft fork released on June 2 temporarily disabled Orchard transactions while preserving overall network stability.
The Zcash development ecosystem is dealing with a crucial soundness flaw in its primary Zcash Orchard privacy pool. Taylor Hornby, an independent security researcher, found the issue on May 29, 2026. He uncovered the bug using a custom auditing agent framework paired with Anthropic’s newly released Claude Opus 4.8 AI model. As the news spread out, the ZEC price dropped $630 to $332, registering a loss of 47% in the last 48-hours.
Zcash Emergency Patch Reveals 4-Year-Old Bug That Could Mint Unlimited ZEC
A critical bug with an under-constrained element in the zero-knowledge proof circuit enabled an arbitrary false input to traverse an elliptic curve multiplication check. Hornby proved that this weakness enabled the mathematical creation of legitimate proofs, which could be misused to create unlimited amounts of undetectable counterfeit ZEC or to facilitate invalid state transitions such as double-spending.
Core developers at the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) and Zcash Foundation privately coordinated a two-step patch that immediately secured the network in response to the private disclosure. On June 2, developers deployed an emergency soft fork (Zebra 4.5.3) that instructed miners to temporarily disable all Orchard-pool transactions.
This was followed by the NU6.2 hard fork upgrade (block height 3,364,600), which was done on June 3 to permanently fix the circuit math and safely re-enable full transaction functionality. The temporary freezing resulted in some minor adjustments in the chains and even caused temporary outages in block explorers, but the underlying blockchain was never out of sync, according to the officials.
Even though the engineering solution was accepted quickly, a market and governance shock has occurred. Given the fact that the vulnerability went undetected since the Orchard pool was launched in May 2022, and the pool’s zero-knowledge privacy characteristics make it impossible to cryptographically prove that the bug was never exploited, heavy investor anxiety was triggered.
Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, and other prominent crypto figures publicly announced to dump their whole ZEC portfolio because of the Orchard Pool exploit. This fear wiped out billions in ZEC market capitalization as its price fell towards the $320 levels.
Going forward, Shielded Labs is working actively to restore systemic trust by creating a detailed protocol upgrade, which will enter a formal proposal next week. The upcoming plan aims to create an entirely new shielded pool and implement a strict turnstile accounting mechanism, which will allow the public to independently verify the total coin supply and prove no counterfeit tokens exist.
For long-term structural risk reduction, developers have also undertaken a formal verification project to ‘math-proof’ the rest of the code base, and a recruitment initiative for a new ‘Head of Security.’
Here’s Why Zcash Price May Extend Correction by Another 22%
Following a notable consolidation above $500 in May 2026, the Zcash price witnessed a sudden drop of $300 in the last 48 hours. This bearish pullback has pushed the price below key exponential moving averages (20, 50, 100, and 200), accentuating the sudden shift in market sentiment.
With today’s price drop, the trading volume hit $2.78—a 109% surge since yesterday, indicating that the market participants are indicating strong participation in the sell-off. If the selling pressure persists, the Zcash price could plunge another 22% to retest the support trendline of a symmetrical triangle pattern at $243.
A broader analysis of the daily chart shows that the ZEC price is likely entering a major sideways trend, within the two converging trendlines of a triangle pattern. If the Zcash development manages to gain investors’ confidence with the new shielded pool, the coin price could hold the $243-$245 support region.
A potential rebound from this bottom support would continue the formation of the triangle pattern, and gradually bolster its price for fresh recovery above $500 again.
