Taylor Hornby, the security engineer who used Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 AI model to find a critical bug in Zcash, says privacy coin Monero is among the tokens he intends to audit next.
When asked on
Monero, which trades under the symbol XMR, is among the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies and hides transaction details by default compared to Zcash, where users can either transact transparently or protected.
Hornby discovered the Zcash vulnerability on May 29. The bug, in the blockchain’s Orchard privacy pool, had gone undetected since May 2022 and could have allowed an attacker to create an unlimited, undetectable counterfeit of ZEC. Shielded Labs, a non-profit developer of the network, disclosed this on Thursday and proposed an emergency patch before June 1.
Zcash fell 38% over the next 24 hours, amid fallout and concerns over a hacker who could steal money from the protected pool – without leaving a detectable trace – over the past few years.
Hornby, hired by Shielded Labs in April to find protocol bugs before attackers could, said he reported the flaw rather than exploit it because Zcash developers were “like family” and he couldn’t “live with that kind of betrayal.”
He plans to apply for a Zcash coin holder grant to fund further work.
