Zcash Mainnet Activates Ironwood Upgrade, Introduces New Shielded Pool to Enhance Supply Security

BlockBeats News, July 28th, according to official sources, the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) has announced that the Ironwood (NU6.3) network upgrade has been activated at mainnet block height 3,428,143. This upgrade introduces a new privacy pool designed to enhance the security of the Zcash network and enable the independent verification of the circulating supply's integrity. With the launch of Ironwood, the existing Orchard privacy pool will be restricted, and funds transferred from Orchard must pass through a "gatekeeper mechanism" before entering Ironwood.

Zcash stated that Ironwood is an ecosystem-wide collaborative upgrade driven by a security vulnerability discovered at the end of May this year in the Orchard privacy pool. The vulnerability has been addressed through an emergency network upgrade, and there is currently no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited, nor is there any evidence that user funds or the total ZEC supply were affected. Building on the corrected Orchard protocol, Ironwood introduces formal verification and independent security audits to further enhance the protocol's resilience against future supply integrity vulnerabilities.

For users, existing funds in Orchard need to be migrated to the new Ironwood privacy pool, and wallets supporting Ironwood will provide a migration path. ZODL users can directly complete the migration through the latest version of the application without needing to create a new wallet or change addresses. Zcash stated that the launch of Ironwood will maintain privacy features while providing the network with stronger verifiability and a more secure foundation for the long term.