Zcash wasn’t down — its block explorers were

A recent security upgrade at privacy-focused blockchain Zcash has sparked rumours of an outage.

On Monday, a “coordinated network upgrade” was implemented, fixing a vulnerability which had been reported in its shielded pool, Orchard.

However, popular Zcash block explorers showed no activity following the upgrade, apparently due to reading data from out-of-date nodes.

X account Solid Intel claimed that the network was “down” and hadn’t produced blocks in four hours. The post gained over 180,000 views and was re-tweeted almost 100 times. It was also amplified, in part, to promote competitor Monero.

However, many responses immediately took issue with Solid Intel’s post.

Helius’ Mert Mumtaz pointed out that Zcash was “not down in any way,” and pointed to a Zcash explorer showing normal network activity.

Others urged people to “first verify before claiming a network is down,” and mocked the lack of investigation.

While the original tweet was left up, with no correction, Solid Intel posted an update 45 minutes later. It clarified that “block explorers, including the official explorer, still appear to be catching up after the upgrade.”

The “news” doesn’t seem to have hurt the price of Zcash; quite the opposite, in fact. $ZEC is up 10% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.

Trouble in the Orchard?

The Zcash network itself may not have suffered an outage, but the recent patch did temporarily disable the Orchard shielded pool.

Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) explained that the bug was identified during “ongoing Zcash security audits.” The fix was implemented in two stages between Monday and Wednesday.

First, a soft fork disabled Orchard transactions because a “direct patch would have revealed too much information about the nature of the issue to anyone with access to the updated code.”

Then, a hard fork was rolled out to “remediate the vulnerability and fully restore Orchard functionality.”

ZODL insists that “there is no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited” or of any change in the $ZEC supply. It also reassures all Zcash users that their privacy remains intact.

Try turning it off and on again

As rumours over Zcash’s status spread, Ink was in the midst of its own outage.

Ink is Kraken’s answer to Coinbase’s Base, an Ethereum layer two network with approximately $230 million of TVL, per DeFiLlama.

On Tuesday, the network’s X account announced “chain-wide outages with intermittent network availability.”

Almost 24 hours later, an update explained that the disruption is due to “a bug in OP-reth, one of the node clients used on the chain.” It added “brief disruptions are possible until a fix is deployed.”

Strangely, Ink’s status page notes “degraded performance” for Tuesday, though it claims a fix has already been implemented and the results are being monitored.

Last week, Sui network experienced three separate downtime incidents, racking up a total of 15 hours of disruption in just two days. The outages were related to a network upgrade and subsequent rushed fix.