Zcash just pulled off one of the more dramatic reversals in recent crypto memory. ZEC surged more than 25% after founder Zooko Wilcox confirmed that Anthropic’s restricted frontier AI model, Mythos, had completed a comprehensive security audit of the Zcash protocol and found no new serious or critical vulnerabilities.
The price climbed to levels near $496-$497, a sharp recovery from the beating the token took just days earlier.
From emergency patch to AI-powered all-clear
The timeline matters here. On June 3-5, 2026, Zcash executed an emergency soft fork to patch a critical forgery vulnerability in its Orchard shielded pool. The bug had been quietly sitting in the codebase since approximately 2022, meaning it existed for roughly four years before anyone caught it.
That disclosure hammered ZEC’s price by approximately 40%. There was no evidence the vulnerability had been exploited before the fix.
