Overview
- A soundness bug in the Orchard shielded pool discovered in late May was patched and led developers to disable Orchard and plan a replacement pool called Ironwood to restore confidence in supply integrity.
- Ironwood pairs a corrected shielded pool with a turnstile migration mechanism that isolates Orchard funds and records migrations so node operators can check total circulating ZEC without seeing individual shielded transactions.
- Project Tachyon, working with zkSecurity, the Zcash Open Development Lab and others, reports it is close to a formal, machine‑checked proof of Ironwood’s circuits using the Lean theorem prover and AI‑assisted proof tools to speed verification.
- A public testnet is active to exercise the new pool and the project is targeting a late‑July mainnet activation that remains conditional on finishing formal proofs, independent audits and ecosystem migration to the updated Z3 software stack.
- Markets have responded to verification progress with short rallies that pushed ZEC briefly above $500 but traders remain cautious because Zcash’s privacy design means there is no cryptographic way to prove Orchard was never exploited in the past.