BlockBeats report: On June 6, 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 named "Ironwood," scheduled for activation by the end of July 2026, with the exact date dependent on testing progress and ecosystem coordination.
Ironwood will retain the existing Orchard protocol but add formal verification and independent security audits, and use the "Turnstile" mechanism to verify the full ZEC supply transferred from Orchard to Ironwood, enabling anyone to audit Zcash’s circulating supply and further enhancing protocol security and transparency.
ZODL stated that the recently discovered Orchard integrity vulnerability was identified through ongoing security research and has been resolved via a coordinated upgrade. There is currently no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited, no indication of user funds being compromised or changes to the total ZEC supply, and the issue did not affect the privacy properties of any privacy pools. Orchard continues to operate normally.
According to the plan, after the upgrade, the Orchard pool will be closed to new deposits and internal transactions; funds can only be migrated to Ironwood via the Turnstile mechanism. Wallets supporting Orchard will offer a one-click migration feature, and the new privacy pool will continue to use users’ existing Orchard addresses, eliminating the need to change receiving addresses.
In addition, ZODL is progressing with the deprecation of zcashd, including the development of the new command-line wallet Zallet, assisting node operators in migrating to Zebrad, and updating wallets and SDKs to support the Ironwood upgrade.