🤔 So, what exactly happened with Zcash? Simply put, Orchard is a “completely invisible” privacy vault within Zcash—once funds are deposited, neither outsiders nor the blockchain itself can see how much is inside or who owns it. The vulnerability emerged in the vault’s “verification lock”—a mechanism that should have been extremely secure, allowing only truly legitimate transactions to pass. However, due to an insufficiently strict mathematical constraint (akin to a loose gear in the lock), attackers were able to forge a key that appeared entirely legitimate, tricking the system into creating new ZEC out of thin air. This incident directly challenges the narrative in the privacy coin sector that “technical trustworthiness equals core value.” As the first blockchain to scale zk-SNARKs for private transactions, Zcash’s Orchard pool—activated in May 2022 with the NU5 upgrade—has long been regarded as a more efficient evolution of the Sapling pool and has held substantial private funds. Now, thanks to a vulnerability discovered by security researchers using the latest AI models, the entire industry is being forced to reevaluate the gap between theoretical privacy technologies and their real-world implementation.