On Friday, Shielded Labs – an independent, donation-funded Zcash support organization remarked that the privacy-focused protocol’s upcoming Ironwood upgrade may face delays. The entity said that exchanges, mining pools, and wallets are likely to need more time to complete Zcash’s Z3 software migration.
Zcash Ironwood upgrade faces timeline challenges
In a recent Zcash community forum post, executive director of Shielded Labs, Jason McGee, noted that two major projects are going ahead simultaneously – the Ironwood upgrade and the Z3 stack.
For the uninitiated, Zcash protocol infrastructure providers have been instructed to replace the project’s existing node and wallet software, zcashd, with a new collection of upgraded tools dubbed the Z3 stack.
Meanwhile, the need for Ironwood arose following the discovery of the infamous “infinity” bug on Orchard, Zcash’s main private transaction pool. The bug could have theoretically enabled any attacker to mint an unlimited amount of ZEC tokens within the pool without any risk of detection.
At the time, Zcash developers stated that there was no evidence of the pool being exploited. However, due to Orchard’s sophisticated privacy features, it’s practically impossible to prove that no counterfeit ZEC was created.
Ironwood is aimed toward opening a replacement private pool to prevent new activity within the Orchard pool. Any funds that exit Orchard would be forced to clear an accounting checkpoint that will disallow more ZEC from exiting than what originally entered.
As a result, users will be able to verify that the circulating supply adheres to Zcash’s hard-coded limits.
Concurrently, zcashd is being retired to make way for a new stack that includes Zebra for operating a network node, Zaino for supplying blockchain data to applications, and Zallet for wallet functions.
McGee noted that Zallet and Zaino are still under development, and not quite tested enough to be moved into the production environment. According to some infrastructure providers, the July end deadline for rollout may not be feasible. However, no delay has yet been finalized.
Volatile times for ZEC
Following the discovery of the Orchard bug, Zcash’s native token – ZEC – saw an instant decline of about 30 percent, erasing several months’ worth of gains within hours.
However, the persistence of the privacy narrative in the crypto industry ensured that pullback was temporary.
According to technical analysis on Wednesday, ZEC is forming a recovery setup as the bulls try to defend the key $400 zone.
