The market value of the private token Zcash (ZEC) has almost halved, plummeting 48% to $302.48. The reason for the panicked sales was news of a critical bug in the network protocol, which theoretically gave the possibility of unlimited and hidden emission of new coins.

The defect in the anonymous Orchard pool was identified on 29 May by cybersecurity expert Taylor Hornby. Notably, the researcher used artificial intelligence - the language model Opus 4.8 from Anthropic - to search for vulnerability. With its help, Hornby not only found a breach but also wrote a working experiment, successfully testing the generation of tokens in a test environment.

The Shielded Labs team confirmed that the vulnerability had been hidden in the code since the release of Pool Orchard in May 2022. Patch was released on June 1. Due to the built-in privacy mechanisms, Zcash developers cannot say with any certainty whether hackers have exploited this bot over the past four years. However, the creators believe that there were no incidents in the main network, as it is extremely difficult to find such an error manually.

To regain community trust, Shielded Labs initiates the creation of a new hidden pool, which will allow for transparent verification of the actual volume of ZEC released. In addition, the organization plans a strict mathematical verification of the Orchard code to exclude any hidden vulnerabilities in the future. This incident was an unpleasant surprise for investors, as in May Zcash experienced a triumphant rally, breaking the psychological barrier of $585 for the first time since the end of 2025.