Zcash Founder Zooko: Ironwood Proposal Aims to Restore User Verification of Zcash Circulating Supply

Zcash founder Zooko said Shielded Labs is working with the Zcash Foundation, Tachyon Group, Valar Group, and the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) on a proposal called “Ironwood” to restore users’ ability to verify the reliability of Zcash’s circulating supply. According to Foresight News, Ironwood would allow users to check whether Zcash’s circulating supply is correct. The proposal follows a critical counterfeiting vulnerability discovered last week in the Zcash Orchard pool. The issue was fixed on June 2 through an emergency network upgrade coordinated by ZODL and other ecosystem participants. Ironwood would create a new shielded pool using the patched Orchard circuit and would reject any transactions that create new outputs in the old Orchard pool. Zooko said the plan also includes measures such as AI-assisted security audits and formal verification to strengthen the codebase. Once activated, users would be able to independently verify circulating supply correctness through their own nodes immediately, without waiting for Orchard pool migration or relying on others’ actions. Zooko added that the upgrade timeline is expected to take longer than anticipated due to the development, testing, review, and ecosystem coordination required. Another uncertainty is the ongoing deprecation of zcashd; while Shielded Labs is not directly involved in that work, migrations by exchanges, mining pools, wallets, and other infrastructure providers to Zebra could affect the timing of the network upgrade.