Zcash Network Deploys Critical Security Patches as ZEC Price Falls 5.5%

Gate News message, April 19 — Zcash price declined 5.47% over the past 24 hours to trade near $325.95, with market capitalization at $5.42 billion and daily trading volume reaching $476.94 million. The price weakness emerged despite the Zcash Open Development Lab and Zcash Foundation announcing coordinated security patches deployed across major mining operations.

The network released zcashd v6.12.1 and Zebra v4.3.1, addressing four vulnerabilities. These included an Orchard action-encoding bug that could crash nodes processing certain transactions, a consensus enforcement gap between the two implementations that could have triggered a chain split, a bug in zcashd turnstile accounting, and undefined behavior linked to unchecked integer arithmetic in pool balance calculations. Mining pools representing a supermajority of network hash power had deployed the patches before public disclosure. Zcash confirmed no evidence of exploitation and that all user funds remained safe with no impact to consensus or privacy.

On-chain metrics remained firm despite the price retreat. The shielded pool recently reached an all-time high with 31% of all ZEC now held in the encrypted pool, up from 11% a year earlier. Shielded transactions now account for 59% of network activity. Zcash network hash rate recently reached a record 16.54 GS/s, indicating continued mining participation. The project is also advancing post-quantum cryptography testing, including NIST-standardized ML-KEM and ML-DSA standards.

On the 12-hour chart, ZEC is forming a rounded base structure with price currently testing the $310 to $330 support zone after a recent pullback from the $380 area. Major resistance remains between $430 and $450. A stable retest of the $310 to $330 range could support another upward move if buying pressure returns.