The thought behind the sharp drop in ZEC is extremely terrifying: no one knows how many ghost counterfeit coins have been issued in the past four years Zcash plummeted by over one-third in a single day. On the surface, it may seem like a security vulnerability has been discovered, but the real logic behind it is chilling: hackers may have infinitely increased ZEC in the past four years, and the entire encrypted world still cannot prove whether this has actually happened. This is an unprecedented crisis of consensus. Breaking down the four core logics behind the ZEC crash, we will guide you through the life and death struggle of the privacy coin industry. 1. Extremely low-level hidden money printing machine vulnerability At the end of May, security researcher Taylor discovered an extremely fatal forgery vulnerability in Zcash's latest generation privacy pool Orchard. The problem lies in the elliptic curve multiplication check of the zero knowledge proof circuit. Due to incomplete constraints, attackers do not need to forcefully crack underlying cryptographic algorithms. They only need to input a specific set of erroneous data to perfectly deceive the system. The most critical aspect is the official characterization of the vulnerability: attackers can generate infinite and completely undetectable forged ZECs within Orchard. 2. Why are large funds still fleeing wildly after fixing the vulnerability After discovering the vulnerability, the official response was rapid and the fix was completely completed through a fork in just a few days. In theory, when all the negative news is released, it is a positive news. Why is the market still panicking? Because only the future is fixed. This vulnerability has existed since Orchard was launched in 2022 and has been lurking for nearly 4 years. Since it is a privacy pool and cannot be detected, has someone discovered this backdoor in the past 4 years? Has a massive amount of counterfeit currency been quietly printed and mixed in the pool? The market's greatest fear is never clear losses, but unquantifiable uncertainty. What the big players are selling is not just a code flaw, but a complete bankruptcy of the credibility of ZEC's total supply. 3. Can the official quarantine mechanism really provide a safety net In order to appease the market, the official repeatedly emphasized that Zcash comes with a revolving door audit mechanism. Their point is that even if there are counterfeit coins in the pool, the system will limit the total amount of assets flowing out of Orchard, without breaking the total limit of 21 million coins in the entire Zcash network. But this is completely avoiding the important and focusing on the trivial. This is equivalent to installing a security checkpoint in the vault. You can only guarantee that there is a limit to the amount of money that can be taken out of the vault every day, but you cannot prove whether there is a pile of counterfeit money in the vault now. Counterfeit currency can either continue to remain in the pool or be replaced with genuine currency within the legal outflow limit and flow into the market without anyone noticing. 4. Terrifying detail upon careful consideration: AI is conducting dimensionality reduction attacks on Web3 There is also the most magical detail in this storm. How did security researchers discover the underlying vulnerabilities of complex zero knowledge proofs that had been hidden for 4 years in just a few days? The answer is the AI big model. Anthropic just released the general large model Claude Opus 4.8 version on May 28th. Just one day later, with the assistance of the new model, the researchers directly excavated this super nuclear bomb and ran the program for unlimited money printing locally. This means that the threshold for discovering high-value vulnerabilities in top tier Web3 is being sharply lowered by large models. The future dark forest on the chain, AI is the most terrifying hunter. The final finale For privacy projects, trust cannot be built on our perception that it has not been attacked, it must be built on anyone being able to verify that it has not been attacked. In order to prove their innocence, the only way out for the Zcash team at present is to build a new privacy pool, so that all the money in the old pool can queue up for security checks and be transferred over, and force the counterfeit currency to show its true form through forced margin trading. But until this major reshuffle is completely completed, in this dark web and geek favorite network, the ghost counterfeit currency that theoretically can exist infinitely will forever be the sword of Damocles hanging over ZEC's head.