Zooko declares Zcash bug-free in latest Mythos security audit

Zcash (ZEC) received a fresh security endorsement on June 12 after Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn confirmed that an AI-powered audit conducted by Anthropic’s Mythos tool uncovered no additional serious vulnerabilities in the protocol.

The clean bill of health arrives as ZEC continues clawing back losses from a 53% crash triggered by the disclosure of a critical counterfeiting bug in its Orchard shielded pool earlier this month.

Shielded Labs, an independent Zcash support organization, commissioned the audit and provided prompts developed by security firm Defuse Security, according to Jason McGee, a community figure who detailed the arrangement on X.

Wilcox-O’Hearn thanked Anthropic for the effort and said the work to harden Zcash’s security would continue.

What does the Mythos audit do for Zcash?

The Mythos audit functions as a de facto external validation at a moment when confidence in Zcash’s codebase is under intense scrutiny.

In early June, researcher Taylor Hornby discovered that the Orchard shielded pool contained a flaw allowing unlimited minting of counterfeit ZEC. The vulnerability had existed for around four years.

While there was no evidence of exploitation, the disclosure was bad news for Zcash, as ZEC fell from approximately $621 to a low of $303 on June 5.

The token made an attempt at recovery on June 8, rising to $427.67, which was a 41.5% recovery of the drop, CoinMarketCap data showed.

As of June 12, ZEC traded around $438 and later dropped to around $410. As of the time of publication, the token was trading around $415 with a market capitalization of over $6.94 billion, per CoinMarketCap.

The Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) reportedly patched the Orchard flaw, and by June 3, it reported that it had resolved the underlying issue. Mining pools ViaBTC and Foundry coordinated with the team on the response, per ZODL founder Josh Swihart.

What other efforts is Zcash making to strengthen security?

The Mythos result is one piece of a wider campaign to harden security by Zcash. The Zcash team published the Ironwood proposal on June 7. It contains a plan for a new shielded pool built on top of the existing Orchard architecture.

Ironwood, co-developed with Tachyon, Valar Group, the Zcash Foundation, and Shielded Labs, would require formal verification and multiple independent audits before deployment.

The Ironwood design introduces turnstile accounting that would migrate all legitimate coins out of the current Orchard pool into the new one. Even if counterfeit ZEC was created in the old pool, it could not cross into Ironwood.

This layered approach, patching the existing flaw, running an independent AI audit, and proposing architectural changes, signals that the Zcash development community is treating the Orchard incident as a catalyst for deeper protocol review rather than a one-time fix.

Market still pricing in uncertainty

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes sold his entire ZEC position after the Orchard disclosure, and ThorChain delayed its planned ZEC integration until the protocol can confirm no significant counterfeit supply exists.

The privacy features that make Zcash valuable also make it impossible to prove with certainty that the bug was never exploited, a tension the Zcash community forum has debated extensively.

Swihart wrote on June 8 that the incident stress-tested the team’s response processes and produced a more unified builder community. The Mythos audit, coming four days later with a clean result, adds an external data point to that narrative.