Zcash Developers Consider New Shielded Pool After Orchard Bug

Zcash developers and researchers are weighing whether a new shielded pool could help restore confidence in supply verification after a recently patched Orchard vulnerability. Shielded Labs said it is exploring a proposed network upgrade that would deploy a second shielded pool and enforce “turnstile accounting” on coins moving from Orchard, and plans to publish a follow-up post next week outlining how the upgrade would work and what tradeoffs it could involve.

Josh Swihart, founder of Zcash Open Development Lab, suggested a second Orchard pool could in principle be targeted for the NU7 upgrade at the end of July, while stopping short of taking a fixed position on building one. The talks follow an emergency network upgrade that patched an Orchard flaw Shielded Labs said could have allowed counterfeit ZEC within the pool; the group also said there is no cryptographic way to prove whether the bug had been exploited, though it believes prior exploitation is unlikely.

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