Zcash rallies over 20% after emergency fork fixes Orchard bug and AI audit finds no new flaws

Zcash deployed an emergency hard fork on June 3‑5 to patch a critical forgery vulnerability in its Orchard shielded pool, a bug that had been present since around 2022. The fix isolated the affected code and restored confidence in the protocol’s cryptographic integrity.

Following the patch, founder Zooko Wilcox announced that Anthropic’s cybersecurity‑focused AI model Mythos conducted a comprehensive audit and found no new serious or critical bugs. The security confirmation, together with the patch, sparked a strong market reaction: ZEC jumped 17‑25% in under ten hours, lifting the price toward $500, adding roughly $1 billion to market capitalization and triggering more than $13 million in short‑position liquidations.

The rapid recovery compressed a typical post‑incident cycle into a week, underscoring the impact of both swift technical remediation and high‑profile AI‑driven security verification on investor sentiment in the cryptocurrency sector.