ZEC has bounced 42% from Friday’s $409 low as ZODL, Shielded Labs, and others proposed the Ironwood upgrade, a new formally verified shielded pool with turnstile supply accounting targeting July activation.

Zcash (ZEC) has rebounded roughly 42% from Friday’s post-disclosure low near $409 to around $580 as a coalition of Zcash developers unveiled an aggressive plan to address the structural issue at the heart of last week’s vulnerability disclosure: the inability of users to independently verify whether the network’s supply has been compromised.

The Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), Shielded Labs, the Zcash Foundation, Tachyon, and Valar Group jointly proposed a new shielded pool called Ironwood, with activation targeted for late July 2026. The upgrade uses the patched Orchard circuit as its base but layers on formal verification, independent security audits, and AI-assisted review. The combined assurance framework is materially more rigorous than what protected Orchard before last week.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The most consequential design element is a turnstile mechanism: every ZEC moving from Orchard to Ironwood will be cryptographically validated against the migrated supply, allowing any node operator to verify the network’s circulating ZEC by summing the active pool balances. That capability addresses the central uncertainty exposed by the disclosure. Even though Shielded Labs found no evidence of exploitation, Orchard’s privacy properties made it impossible to prove cryptographically that no counterfeit ZEC was ever minted. Ironwood resolves that question going forward and lets users move their existing funds into a pool where the supply is fully auditable.

The migration mechanics are designed to be friction-light for users. Orchard will stop accepting new deposits and intra-pool transfers once Ironwood activates. Funds in Orchard can be transferred one-click through supported wallets, keeping existing receiving addresses. The technical handoff is part of a broader ZODL infrastructure refresh that includes deprecating zcashd, developing a new command-line wallet called Zallet, and updating SDKs to support the upgrade.

Taylor Hornby, the researcher who used Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 to find the original Orchard bug, told CoinDesk he has added Monero to his audit queue, applying the same methodology to the largest non-ZK privacy coin. The Zcash team has framed the incident as proof that proactive AI red-teaming works.