Josh Swihart, founder of Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), has provided further details on how the Zcash team resolved a critical vulnerability in the Orchard shielded pool.
In a Sunday post on X, Swihart wrote that the ZODL team has dispatched a two-step emergency upgrade for privacy-focused blockchain network Zcash.
The first step was a soft fork designed to disable Orchard transactions and mitigate the "risk of an exploit without revealing the full scope of the issue before responsible disclosure," said Swihart.
A follow-up hard fork (NU6.2) was activated on June 3 to address the underlying issue and re-enable Orchard transactions, per the post.
The move comes after independent support group Shielded Labs disclosed a severe vulnerability in Zcash's Orchard pool that exposed the network to potential unlimited minting of counterfeit ZEC. The group said the bug had been fixed, and it is unlikely that an actual exploit took place.
