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, trading under the symbol XMR, is among the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies and hides transaction details by default compared to Zcash, where users can access it transparently or protected.
Hornby found the Zcash bug on May 29. The bug, in the Orchard blockchain privacy group, had not been detected since May 2022 and could have allowed an attacker to create unlimited and undetectable counterfeit ZECs. Shielded Labs, a nonprofit developer of the network, revealed this on Thursday and pushed for an emergency fix by June 1.
Zcash fell 38% in the following 24 hours amid the fallout and concern that a hacker could steal money from the protected fund, without leaving any detectable trace, in recent years.
Hornby, hired by Shielded Labs in April to find protocol errors before attackers could, said he reported the flaw rather than exploiting 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 future work.
