The Zcash team has recently discovered and fixed a huge vulnerability of its system. Now, the team explained all about it on its official site. This vulnerability would have allowed hackers to counterfeit ZEC on the network, which would be a huge problem for the company.

By using this bug, someone could print infinite ZEC tokens, which would completely destabilize the balance of the network and could cause severe issues as no one that exploited the bug would be happy with creating just half a dozen tokens and, as the transactions are anonymous, it would be hard to track the losses.

According to the team, the vulnerability was first discovered in March 2018, but the announcement only happened now. The bug was discovered by Ariel Gabizon. The original patch was made on October 28, 2018, but was not announced as the team was afraid that someone could be interested in exploring the bug.

The report indicates that the bug, which was fixed during the Sapling upgrade of the network, was created by a variant of the zk-SNARKs, which is used as a way to encrypt and shield the transactions made with Zcash.

Both Komodo and Horizen (ZenCash) suffered from this issue and the company told the teams about the problem back in 2018 via an encrypted email, which led both teams to also fix the problem on their platforms. Part of why the announcement of the bug took so much time was mainly because the team had to be sure that no one would be affected from the issue going public.

The Director of Product Security of Zcash, Benjamin Winston, has explained that an attacker would not be detected if he was able to use the exploit, but that the issue is not 100% solved.

Unfortunately, no one can know for sure whether someone counterfeited tokens or not. Since the technology is private, someone could have done that in the past and there is no way to find out.

While not the most well-ranked privacy coin in the market, a position that belongs to Monero (XMR), Zcash is a very relevant privacy coin. According to CoinMarketCao, ZEC tokens are currently worth $48 USD and are the 21st top token of the market by size with a market cap of $281.023.021 USD and a volume of $157.242.213 in the last 24 hours.

Other important highlights include the fact that Grayscale Investments has forecasted that Zcash could be worth over $62,000 USD by 2025 last year and that Edward Snowden, the famous American whistleblower, believes that Zcash is a better alternative than Bitcoin.

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