Zcash holders approved $8.39 million in retroactive grants for completed work, funding 17 out of 37 proposals – this is 93.1% of the requested $9.01 million. The largest vote involved approximately 2.18 million ZEC, which is 10.4% of the fixed supply of 21 million coins.
Among the largest approvals are two grants of $750,000 related to the discovery of the Orchard vulnerability by Taylor Hornby. One covered the initial bug bounty, while the second was added through a community nomination, bringing the total to $1.5 million. According to Shielded Labs, Hornby discovered the issue on May 29 during a review of Orchard using traditional methods and the Anthropic Opus 4.8 model. The vulnerability affected the zk-proof contour of Orchard and could have allowed the creation of counterfeit ZEC within the shielded pool without an obvious trace on the blockchain. The Zcash Foundation temporarily disabled Orchard transactions and then activated NU6.2 with the corrected contour. The analysis found no unauthorized value creation.
Zooko Wilcox, co-founder of Zcash, wrote on October 1 that the grants rewarded those who worked on the network during the security crisis and called the voting a testament to a governance system driven by coin holders. The voting extended far beyond Hornby’s reward: $1.95 million was awarded to ZODL for protocol development for Q1–Q2, $1.203 million to ValarGroup for Ironwood, $738,942 for zk-SNARK contour verification, $599,000 for external audits, $425,000 for five critical Zebra vulnerabilities, $400,000 for an unlimited-mint exploit, and $150,000 for a Zebra bounty. Twenty proposals were rejected.
Related articles
