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Fortitude Mining Holdings and HeartSciences today announced that they have signed a definitive merger agreement to complete a business combination through an all-stock transaction.It is reported that Fortitude Mining Holdings is a vertically integrated digital asset mining platform focused on Zcash mining.The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2026. Upon completion of the transaction, the merged company will continue to use the Fortitude brand and will be operated by the existing management team of Fortitude, including Fortitude CEO Andrea Childs. The new company plans to list on the NASDAQ capital market, with the stock ticker expected to be "TUDE," but it still requires NASDAQ approval.

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox posted to express gratitude to Anthropic for helping to protect Zcash users.At the request of Shielded Labs, they conducted a security audit of Zcash using Mythos, and no other serious vulnerabilities were found in the Zcash protocol. Shielded Labs and other teams are continuing to advance security reinforcement work, and updates will be released later.

Zcash core developer Sean Bowe published an update on the progress of the Ironwood upgrade, stating that in the past 48 hours, protocol developers from various organizations have held two meetings and reached consensus on several specifications and implementation details of Ironwood, including disabling Orchard pool bundling in Coinbase transactions, using anchors for hardware wallet migration authentication data, and the order of processing ZIPs and specifications. Currently, the Ironwood circuit and ZIP 2005 integration draft are under review. Valar Group has completed the setup of the testnet and implemented some changes on the wallet side.Meanwhile, formal verification work continues to advance, and the development team plans to hold a meeting tomorrow to determine the final verification strategy. In addition, at least three mainstream auditing firms are conducting security audits on Orchard, and multiple AI auditing tools have also been put into use. Sean Bowe stated that overall development progress is going smoothly.

According to Arkham monitoring, a certain address has just withdrawn approximately 1% of the total amount from the Zcash privacy pool Orchard Pool. Currently, Orchard Pool theoretically still holds about 3.88 million ZEC, valued at approximately 1.65 billion dollars at the current price.

The Zcash developers have completed the consensus rule changes for the Ironwood upgrade and plan to activate this upgrade in July. This upgrade will introduce a new privacy transaction pool based on the Orchard protocol to replace the old Orchard pool, and adjustments will be made to ensure that the circulating supply of ZEC remains constrained.According to the developers' plan, Ironwood will introduce a "flag" mechanism between the old and new Orchard pools, restricting the old pool from receiving new transactions while allowing for change generation as a privacy protection measure. After the upgrade is activated, the old Orchard pool will be prohibited from receiving new deposits, and wallets will route new transactions to the new pool.The developers stated that this design combines the existing turnstile mechanism to ensure that the circulating supply of ZEC cannot be infinitely minted and allows users to migrate their funds to the new pool to reduce potential risks.

Core contributors of the Zcash ecosystem, ZODL, announced that they are collaborating with Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation, and Shielded Labs to propose a new network upgrade plan and privacy pool called Ironwood.Ironwood will be built on the existing Orchard protocol and will further enhance security through formal verification and additional independent audits.

According to CoinDesk, security engineer Taylor Hornby, who discovered a serious vulnerability in Zcash using the Anthropic Opus 4.8 AI model, stated that Monero (XMR) has been added to the audit queue, and more privacy coin projects will undergo security reviews in the future.Hornby previously discovered a critical vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard privacy pool on May 29, which had gone unnoticed since May 2022 and could theoretically allow attackers to create unlimited undetectable fake ZEC. The development team at Shielded Labs completed an emergency fix before June 1 and subsequently disclosed the details of the vulnerability. As a result of the incident, ZEC dropped by as much as 38% within 24 hours after the news broke, with the market concerned that attackers may have exploited the vulnerability to steal funds from the privacy pool without leaving on-chain traces.Hornby stated that he was commissioned by the nonprofit organization Shielded Labs in April of this year to identify protocol vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them. Although he had the means to profit from the vulnerability, he chose to report the issue to the development team, stating that "such betrayal is unacceptable." Additionally, Hornby plans to apply for funding from the Zcash community to support subsequent security research efforts.

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb published a statement regarding the recently patched Zcash vulnerability, indicating that there are many misunderstandings in the market about this event. He pointed out that even if the vulnerability had been exploited before it was fixed, attackers could only profit by faking ZEC in the privacy pool, and these tokens must first be converted from a privacy address to a transparent address to enter mainstream trading platforms.Since the supply of ZEC in transparent addresses can be publicly verified, any abnormal transfers exceeding the maximum supply will be detected and blocked, so the vast majority of investors holding transparent ZEC and exchange users will not be affected.Haseeb stated that the Zcash team plans to introduce a new "Turnstile" mechanism and a brand new privacy pool in future upgrades to verify that there is no inflation issue in the current privacy pool. He also mentioned that formally verified cryptographic systems can reduce implementation errors from a design perspective. Haseeb finally disclosed that Dragonfly still holds ZEC, and he is also a ZODL investor.

Dragonfly partner Haseeb tweeted to clarify the recently fixed vulnerability in Zcash. He stated that if the vulnerability had been exploited before the fix (although the probability is extremely low), it would manifest as the privacy pool minting false ZEC. Attackers would need to sell quickly, but since the market primarily trades transparent ZEC, they cannot directly sell the unmasked privacy ZEC on mainstream exchanges. Therefore, the losses would mainly be borne by users holding privacy ZEC, with almost no impact on holders of transparent ZEC and price discovery.Haseeb emphasized that the Zcash team will introduce a new turnstile mechanism and a brand new privacy pool in the next upgrade to verify that the privacy pool has not been inflated. He also has high hopes for formal verification technology, believing it is an important path for enhancing software security across the industry in the future, especially crucial for privacy protocols.

According to the THORChain blog, ZEC has been added to the THORChain launch queue, but due to a recently disclosed vulnerability in Zcash that affects the normal use of integrators, THORChain needs to complete a code modification in the Bifrost module before proceeding.The development team stated that the modification is very minor but must be completed before the launch of ZEC. Currently, Monero (XMR) is expected to launch at the end of this month, with ZEC following afterward.

On May 29, 2026, Taylor Hornby discovered a critical forgery vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard funding pool. Taylor Hornby reported the vulnerability to the Zcash Open Development Lab, and all parties collaborated to complete the fix on June 2. This vulnerability could be exploited to secretly create an unlimited number of forged ZEC within Zcash Orchard. Due to the privacy features of Orchard, it is impossible to cryptographically prove whether the vulnerability was exploited before the fix was deployed. The vulnerability had existed since the activation of Orchard in May 2022, until an emergency fix was deployed on June 1, 2026.With the assistance of AI tools, Taylor Hornby wrote a complete exploit and generated unlimited and undetectable forged ZEC in a local testing 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.

The official announcement from the Zcash (ZEC) Foundation states that independent security researcher Taylor Hornby discovered a serious reliability vulnerability in the Orchard zero-knowledge proof circuit on May 29, which could allow double spending within the Orchard pool.Core engineers from ZODL confirmed the issue within hours and initiated a fix. To buy time, they temporarily disabled Orchard operations through an emergency soft fork of Zebra 4.5.3 in the early hours of June 2. Finally, today, they activated the NU6.2 hard fork through Zebra 5.0 — at 12:05 PM Beijing time, the mainnet successfully completed the upgrade at block height 3,364,600, re-enabling Orchard with the corrected circuit, and the vulnerability was permanently closed.This is the second time Zcash has triggered a protocol upgrade due to security issues since its launch in 2016, with no known exploits occurring during the process. The network's total supply guard mechanism confirmed that the total supply remained intact, and user privacy, as well as Sapling and transparent transactions, were not affected.

Helius CEO mert tweeted that the news regarding the Zcash network outage is inaccurate, and the network is not down. Some browser applications connected to faulty nodes, which caused the browsers to display errors, but the network is functioning perfectly fine.Previously, it was reported that the Zcash network is currently in a stalled state, with no blocks produced in the past 4 hours.

According to Solid Intel, the Zcash network is currently stagnant, with no blocks produced in the past 4 hours.

The Zcash Foundation announced the release of the Zebra 4.5.1 version update to fix a consensus-level security vulnerability and strongly recommends that all node operators upgrade immediately.The vulnerability, identified as GHSA-2prc-cj5x-4443, involves a sigop (signature operation count) statistical error in P2SH transactions, which could lead to potential consensus fork risks. This fix corrects the incomplete patch issue from the previous 4.5.0 version, which was just released yesterday.The Zcash development team stated that the problem originated from discrepancies in sigop counting logic across different implementations, which could cause nodes to produce different results when validating transactions, thereby affecting on-chain consensus consistency. The fix was implemented by reverting and adjusting the Rust implementation logic to ensure alignment with the expected behavior of the protocol.The Zcash Foundation emphasizes that there is currently no workaround for this issue, and upgrading to 4.5.1 is the only way to ensure that nodes remain on the correct chain and avoid potential fork risks.

The Zcash Foundation has released the node client Zebra version 4.5.0 update, which includes multiple security fixes, including a critical consensus vulnerability and several high-risk denial of service (DoS) issues. All node operators are strongly advised to upgrade immediately.It is reported that this core fix includes a sigop counting error caused by P2SH script parsing (which may lead to a consensus fork with zcashd), a defect in the NU5 block validation cache logic, a risk of transparent address balance overflow crashes, as well as multiple crashes and resource exhaustion vulnerabilities in RPC interfaces and memory pool handling. Additionally, some vulnerabilities can be exploited by malicious nodes, leading to node freezes, reboot loops, or even permanent shutdowns.

Arthur Hayes stated that as large tech companies, governments, and AI continue to expand their surveillance capabilities, monetary privacy will "become very necessary" in the future.Arthur Hayes mentioned that this is also the reason he has chosen the privacy coin Zcash (ZEC) as his second-largest personal holding.

The financial report for the first quarter of 2026 released by the Zcash Foundation shows that as of March 31, the foundation's total current assets were approximately $36.7 million, with net current assets around $36.68 million. This includes about $12.11 million in cash (USD), 506,556 USDC, 85,412 ZEC (approximately $21.2 million), 41.8 BTC (approximately $2.85 million), and 12.02 ETH (approximately $25,000).In addition, the foundation's average monthly operating expenses for the first quarter were approximately $272,500, with the Protocol / Zebra project accounting for the highest proportion at 50.4%. Zcash Foundation Executive Director Alex Bornstein stated that the focus for Q2 will continue to advance the NU7 upgrade, Z3 technology stack development, and Zebra performance optimization.