ZEC drops 30% as Shielded Labs reveals more about infinite counterfeit bug

ZEC market capitalization fell by almost $3 billion over the past 24 hours following the disclosure of a critical vulnerability, despite it being patched already.

The price of ZEC fell on Thursday after further details were disclosed of a critical counterfeiting vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard pool that could theoretically allow a bad actor to mint an unlimited amount of ZEC.

According to a post on X, security engineer Taylor Hornby, who was engaged by Shielded Labs, discovered the bug on May 29 and disclosed it to the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), which deployed an emergency response to fix the vulnerability with a hard fork activated on June 3.

However, there are new concerns about the extent to which the vulnerability, which has existed since May 2022, has been used, leading Zcash to fall more than 30% over the past 24 hours to $410 at the time of writing. Its market capitalization has shrunk by more than $3 billion.