Orchard | Crypto

Ironwood would close the old Orchard pool to new activity and route funds through a turnstile before they enter a new shielded pool. Zcash developers are proposing a new shielded pool called Ironwood after a recently patched bug raised concerns about whether counterfeit ZEC could have entered circulation unnoticed. The Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) said Saturday that it is working with Tachyon, Valar Group, the Zcash Foundation and Shielded Labs on the proposed network upgrade, which would add formal verification and independent audits to the Orchard protocol, a privacy system that lets users move ZEC without revealing transaction details. The proposal would close the current Orchard pool to new deposits and internal transactions, requiring funds to pass through a “turnstile,” which serves as an accounting checkpoint, before entering Ironwood. Read more

Zcash Open Development Lab said the network briefly became unstable as miners upgraded, while the Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence of an exploit. Zcash developers temporarily suspended Orchard transactions after discovering a critical vulnerability in the privacy-focused blockchain’s latest shielded pool, then restored functionality through an emergency network upgrade. On Wednesday, the Zcash Foundation said the vulnerability affected Orchard’s zero-knowledge proof circuit and could have allowed invalid state transitions within the pool. However, the Foundation said there was no evidence that the bug was exploited, no unauthorized value creation was detected, and user privacy was not affected. The fix was carried out through a two-step emergency upgrade. Zebra 4.5.3 temporarily disabled Orchard actions, while Zebra 5.0.0 activated the NU6.2 upgrade to re-enable Orchard with a corrected circuit, according to the Foundation.  Read more