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Mythos Audit Clears Zcash
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn said Anthropic’s restricted Mythos AI audit found no additional serious bugs in the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the review at Shielded Labs’s request, with Wilcox posting that it “did not find any more serious bugs in the Zcash protocol.”
“Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn publicly thanked Anthropic this week, confirming the artificial intelligence (AI) company ran a full security audit of the Zcash protocol using its restricted frontier model, Mythos, and found no additional critical vulnerabilities”
The audit followed an Orchard shielded-pool crisis in which a critical soundness bug in the Orchard shielded pool triggered a “38% to 50% price collapse in ZEC within 48 hours” after public disclosure on June 4 and 5.
Reuters and other outlets tied the emergency response to rapid network changes, including a soft fork on June 2 that temporarily disabled all Orchard actions and a hard fork on June 3, the NU6.2 upgrade, that activated a corrected circuit and re-enabled Orchard with no chain split.
As of June 13, Bitcoin News reported ZEC trading in the $411 to $416 range, stabilizing above the $400 support level after recovering from June 5 lows near $300, while the market cap sat near $6.9 to $7.0 billion.
Orchard Fallout and Access
Multiple outlets linked the Mythos review to the Orchard forgery flaw, with FinanceFeeds describing a four-year-old forgery bug in the Orchard shielded pool and stating that the Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence the vulnerability was exploited, no unauthorized value creation detected, and user privacy was unaffected.
Yellow reported that Shielded Labs requested the review and that “Anthropic pulled its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models on Friday under a US export control order,” placing the audit outcome alongside Anthropic’s shifting access controls.
FinanceFeeds said the Orchard issue was discovered by security researcher Taylor Hornby with the help of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model, and it framed the follow-up audit as a confidence check after the June 3 incident that forced a temporary suspension of Orchard transactions.
TradingView similarly quoted Wilcox saying the audit did not find “any more serious bugs” in the Zcash protocol, while also reiterating the June 3 temporary suspension and same-day emergency upgrade that restored functionality.
What Comes Next for ZEC
Even with the clean Mythos result, Bitcoin News said Zooko was explicit that security work continues, including “formal verification of the Orchard circuit” and plans to hire a Head of Security and a dedicated cryptographer.
“MetaMask users are facing connectivity problems across multiple networks after MetaMask Support said there is “currently a disruption to connectivity on multiple networks”
The same source tied the next major step to the Ironwood upgrade, targeting activation in late July 2026, with a new shielded pool using the corrected Orchard circuit and “stricter turnstile accounting to allow independent supply verification.”
FinanceFeeds added that the Zcash Foundation said there was no evidence of exploitation and no unauthorized value creation, but it also emphasized that the absence of serious new findings does not eliminate protocol risk and that confidence depends heavily on cryptographic design, audits, and rapid disclosure when bugs are found.
Yellow and FinanceFeeds both described how the Orchard disclosure had already triggered market stress, with Yellow saying the disclosure briefly sank ZEC more than 50% and FinanceFeeds noting the June 3 incident that forced a temporary suspension of Orchard transactions, leaving holders watching for further updates as Ironwood development proceeds.
