BlockBeats News, June 6th, the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), in collaboration with Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation, and Shielded Labs, proposed a new network upgrade and shielded pool called "Ironwood," scheduled to activate by the end of July 2026, with the specific timing depending on the progress of testing and ecosystem coordination.
Ironwood will adopt the existing Orchard protocol but will enhance it with formal verification and independent security audits. It will also validate the entire ZEC supply transferred from Orchard to Ironwood through a "Turnstile" mechanism, allowing anyone to audit Zcash's circulating supply, thereby further enhancing protocol security and transparency.
ZODL stated that a recent integrity vulnerability in Orchard was discovered during ongoing security research and has been fixed through a coordinated upgrade. There is currently no evidence to suggest that the vulnerability was exploited, and there are no signs of user funds being compromised or any changes in the total ZEC supply. The issue did not affect the privacy properties of any shielded pools, and Orchard continues to operate as normal.
According to the plan, post-upgrade, the Orchard pool will stop accepting new deposits and internal transactions, and funds can only be migrated to Ironwood through the Turnstile mechanism. Wallets supporting Orchard will offer a one-click migration feature, and new shielded pools will continue to use users' existing Orchard addresses without the need to change the receiving address.
Furthermore, ZODL is advancing the deprecation of zcashd, including developing a new command-line wallet called Zallet, assisting node operators in migrating to Zebrad, and updating wallets and SDKs to support the Ironwood upgrade.
