Zcash Flaw Sparks Monero Audit Interest as Privacy Coin Debate Heats Up

• The flaw was found on May 29th by Taylor Hornby, a security expert hired by Shielded Labs.
• One of the tokens that security researcher Taylor Hornby plans to audit next is privacy coin Monero.

After non-profit developer Shielded Labs revealed a serious weakness in the blockchain’s Orchard privacy pool, which could have jeopardized the integrity of the token supply, Zcash (ZEC) fell 38% in 24 hours, speeding up the drop. Recent trading for ZEC has been around $361, with a low of $290, and the price has made some modest recovery of around 8% in the last 24 hours as per data from CMC.

Fresh Security Scrutiny

On Thursday night, Shielded Labs released a comprehensive disclosure about X, exposing a security hole that, if used, might have enabled an attacker to secretly produce an infinite supply of fake ZEC tokens. Imagine someone sneaking into the Federal Reserve’s dollar printing machine and making off with a bunch of additional cash; the only difference is that not even the Fed would know it happened.

The flaw was found on May 29th by Taylor Hornby, a security expert hired by Shielded Labs in April 2026 to find protocol weaknesses before bad guys could. The Orchard circuit is the cryptographic scheme supporting Zcash’s most sophisticated privacy pool; Hornby performed a focused evaluation of it using Anthropic’s newly published Opus 4.8 AI model.

One of the tokens that security researcher Taylor Hornby plans to audit next is privacy coin Monero. Hornby utilized Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 AI model to discover a serious flaw in Zcash. Hornby said, “Absolutely!” when asked on X whether he could find vulnerabilities in private coins like Monero. Adding that, Monero will be put up to my list of things to audit.

Unlike Zcash, which gives users the option to be either visible or shielded, Monero (XMR) defaults to hiding transaction data and is one of the biggest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies.

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