A $1.5 million "Thank You"
On October 1st, the Zcash community approved 17 retrospective funding proposals through on-chain voting, with the largest grant—$1.5 million—awarded to a security researcher: Taylor Hornby.
The story begins in May this year. Hornby used Anthropic's Opus 4.8 for a security audit and discovered a critical vulnerability in the zero-knowledge proof circuit of the Zcash Orchard protocol: theoretically, an attacker could forge $ZEC out of thin air within the shielded pool, leaving almost no trace on-chain.
Hornby chose not to exploit it.
He chose to disclose it.
In the end, not a single ZEC was illicitly minted, and the total supply remained intact.
Now, the community says "thank you" with $1.5 million in cold, hard cash.
On October 1st, the Zcash community approved 17 retrospective funding proposals through on-chain voting, with the largest grant—$1.5 million—awarded to a security researcher: Taylor Hornby.
The story begins in May this year. Hornby used Anthropic's Opus 4.8 for a security audit and discovered a critical vulnerability in the zero-knowledge proof circuit of the Zcash Orchard protocol: theoretically, an attacker could forge $ZEC out of thin air within the shielded pool, leaving almost no trace on-chain.
Hornby chose not to exploit it.
He chose to disclose it.
In the end, not a single ZEC was illicitly minted, and the total supply remained intact.
Now, the community says "thank you" with $1.5 million in cold, hard cash.
