Zcash plans to launch the Ironwood upgrade at the end of July 2026, introducing a new privacy pool and enhancing the verifiability of total supply
The Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) has proposed a new network upgrade and shielded pool named "Ironwood" in collaboration with Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation, and Shielded Labs, scheduled to be activated by the end of July 2026, with the exact timing depending on the progress of testing and ecological coordination. Ironwood will continue to use the existing Orchard protocol but will add formal verification and independent security audits, and will verify the entire ZEC supply transferred from Orchard to Ironwood through the "Turnstile" mechanism, allowing anyone to audit the circulating supply of Zcash, thereby further enhancing the security and transparency of the protocol.ZODL stated that the recently discovered integrity vulnerability in Orchard was identified during ongoing security research and has been fixed through a coordinated upgrade. Currently, there is no evidence that the vulnerability has been exploited, nor are there any signs that user funds have been compromised or that the total supply of ZEC has changed. Related issues have not affected the privacy attributes of any privacy pools, and Orchard continues to operate normally. According to the plan, after the upgrade, the Orchard pool will close to new deposits and internal transactions, and funds can only be migrated to Ironwood through the Turnstile mechanism. Wallets supporting Orchard will provide a one-click migration feature, and the new privacy pool will continue to use users' existing Orchard addresses without the need to change the receiving address. In addition, ZODL is advancing the deprecation of zcashd, including the development of a new command-line wallet Zallet, assisting node operators in migrating to Zebrad, and updating wallets and SDKs to support the Ironwood upgrade.