Key Takeaways
- Zcash has deployed an emergency hard fork to patch a critical Orchard pool vulnerability.
- ZEC surged 17% toward $500, adding over $1 billion to its market cap and liquidating $13 million in shorts.
- Shielded Labs confirms an Anthropic AI security audit found no further bugs before the upcoming upgrade.
ZEC Liquidates $13M in Short Bets
Privacy coin ZEC surged early Monday, June 15, amid reports that the Zcash protocol underwent an emergency hard fork to fix a recently uncovered counterfeiting vulnerability. At the time of writing, the privacy coin was nearing $500, a level it last traded at shortly before the Orchard vulnerability was discovered.
Market data showed ZEC, which traded over $550 at the start of the month, was at one point up 17%, having jumped from $426 to $498 in less than 10 hours. This increase saw ZEC add more than $1 billion to its market capitalization, which rose from $7.14 billion to $8.3 billion. The rebound also saw just over $13 million in short bets on the privacy coin liquidated in a 12-hour window, compared with less than $500,000 in longs.
Although the privacy coin’s surge coincided with a broader market rebound that saw bitcoin nearly tap $66,000, it also followed a claim by Zooko Wilcox that a security audit using Anthropic’s restricted AI model found no further bugs. In a June 15 X post expanding on the Orchard vulnerability, Wilcox and Shielded Labs colleague Jason McGee noted that while they cannot say with certainty whether the flaw was exploited, there are plausible reasons to believe it was not.n.
Wilcox and McGee underscored the significance of the upcoming network upgrade, framing it as a definitive resolution to the systemic threat. By isolating the affected code, the fix aims to restore total cryptographic transparency to the privacy network.
“By sealing the Orchard pool, it restores users’ ability to independently verify the soundness of the Zcash supply,” the two researchers explained. “Users no longer need to determine whether counterfeiting occurred in order to verify that the protocol’s supply limits are upheld.”
Meanwhile, ZEC’s near 20% jump made it one of a handful of high-cap altcoins with double-digit gains over a 24-hour period. NEAR was one of those, rising 13.8% to $2.40, while WLD jumped nearly 15%. HYPE, which began the period trading just under $60, went up 9.2% to $65.45, reclaiming its position as the 10th-largest digital asset by market capitalization.
There were also notable gains for several other high-cap altcoins, which helped lift the total altcoin market cap from approximately $1 trillion to $1.06 trillion. Overall, the cryptocurrency market rose 2.1% following the announcement of a U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding.
