Zcash Rises 17% After Emergency Fork; $13M Shorts Liquidated
Zcash jumped 17% to about $498 after an emergency hard fork sealed an Orchard pool flaw, adding more than $1 billion in market value and liquidating about $13 million in shorts.
Zcash (ZEC) rose about 17% to roughly $498 on June 15 after developers deployed an emergency hard fork to address a counterfeiting vulnerability in the Orchard pool.
The token climbed from about $426 to $498 in under 10 hours, pushing its market capitalization from roughly $7.14 billion to about $8.3 billion. Exchange data show just over $13 million in short positions were liquidated over a 12-hour window, while long position liquidations totaled under $500,000.
Zooko Wilcox, founder of Zcash, and Shielded Labs researcher Jason McGee wrote that the fork isolates the affected Orchard code path to stop potential counterfeit supply. They noted an audit using a restricted Anthropic AI model found no additional flaws ahead of a planned network upgrade, but investigators could not confirm whether the vulnerability had been exploited before the patch.
In a post on X, the two wrote: “By sealing the Orchard pool, it restores users’ ability to independently verify the soundness of the Zcash supply.” The developers said the patch removes the need for users to inspect past state forgeries to confirm the protocol’s supply limits.
The emergency patch will be followed by a scheduled network upgrade intended to make the fix permanent. Node operators and other participants are expected to apply the upgrade to restore the protocol’s full cryptographic guarantees.
The ZEC rally occurred as the broader crypto market strengthened, with bitcoin nearing $66,000. Other large-cap tokens also gained: NEAR rose about 13.8% to $2.40, WLD gained nearly 15%, and HYPE increased about 9.2% to $65.45, regaining a top-10 market-cap spot. The total altcoin market capitalization rose from roughly $1 trillion to $1.06 trillion, and the overall crypto market advanced about 2.1% following reports of a U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding.
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