Odaily reported that Taylor Hornby discovered a critical counterfeiting vulnerability in Zcash's Orchard pool on May 29, 2026. Taylor Hornby reported the vulnerability to the Zcash Open Development Lab, and the parties worked together to complete the fix on June 2. The vulnerability could potentially be exploited to secretly create an unlimited number of counterfeit ZEC within Zcash's Orchard. Due to the privacy features of Orchard, it is cryptographically impossible to prove whether the vulnerability was exploited before the fix.

The vulnerability existed since the activation of Orchard in May 2022 until an emergency fix was deployed on June 1, 2026. Taylor Hornby, with the assistance of AI tools, wrote a complete exploit program and generated unlimited, undetectable counterfeit ZEC in a local test environment. Currently, Shielded Labs is collaborating with other Zcash developers to explore network upgrade proposals that would allow anyone to verify the integrity of Zcash's supply.

Odaily, OKX market数据显示，ZEC dropped to 250 USDT and is currently trading at 263 USDT, with a 24-hour decline of 54.61%.

Previously, Zcash fixed a vulnerability that could have allowed unlimited minting of ZEC. Due to the nature of the privacy pool, it cannot be verified whether the vulnerability was ever exploited, nor can it be proven whether ZEC tokens were minted as a result.

Odaily Planet Daily News: ZEC treasury company Cypherpunk stated that all software has vulnerabilities. Historically, Bitcoin once "over-minted" 184 billion BTC due to a bug. However, this does not mean blockchain technology should be abandoned; instead, security should be enhanced through formal verification and provable correctness.

Cypherpunk emphasized that with the development of AI technology, vulnerability detection will become faster and more extensive, but the key lies in who can identify problems before malicious actors. Zcash will demonstrate its capability to do so through an upcoming update.