Zcash’s new Ironwood pool receives $80M in first day as network seals old shielded pool over counterfeiting bug

Zcash just pulled off one of the more dramatic infrastructure swaps in crypto history. On July 28, the network activated its Ironwood upgrade, sealing off the old Orchard shielded pool entirely and standing up a brand new one from scratch, starting at a zero balance. Within the first full day, roughly 176,000 ZEC, worth approximately $81 million, crossed over into the new Ironwood pool. That sounds like a lot of money moving fast. In context, though, it represents about 5% of the roughly 3.66 million ZEC that sat in the now-sealed Orchard pool, a stash valued at around $1.7 billion. The other 95% is still sitting behind what amounts to a velvet rope, waiting for holders to voluntarily migrate. Why Zcash killed its own pool Here’s the thing. Zcash didn’t seal the Orchard pool because of a theoretical risk. A real soundness bug was discovered in Orchard’s proof circuit on May 29, 2026. The kind of bug that could, in theory, allow someone to counterfeit tokens without detection. The truly unsettling part: this vulnerability had existed since Orchard launched in May 2022. That’s over four years of a privacy-focused shielded pool running with an undetected flaw in its cryptographic plum...