About $80 million ZEC crosses into Zcash’s Ironwood pool in the first day

About 176,000 ZEC, worth roughly $81 million, had migrated into Zcash’s new Ironwood shielded pool by Wednesday, a day after the upgrade activated and sealed the pool where a counterfeiting flaw had gone undetected for four years.

That is roughly 5% of the 3.66 million ZEC held in Orchard at activation. Orchard’s balance has since fallen to about 3.51 million, with around 46,000 ZEC crossing over in the past 24 hours, according to the Ironwood migration tracker.

Zcash holds funds in separate compartments called pools, each one a generation of the network’s privacy technology. The transparent pool works like bitcoin, with every balance and transaction visible on the chain, and holds about 12.5 million ZEC.

The shielded pools hide amounts and participants. Sapling, introduced in 2018, holds about 582,000 ZEC, and Orchard, which arrived in 2022 and was the newest until this week, held about 3.5 million. Each time the network upgrades its privacy cryptography, it opens a new pool rather than rebuilding the old one, leaving holders to move their coins across themselves.