BlockBeats News, June 6th – Security engineer Taylor Hornby, who discovered a critical vulnerability in Zcash using the Anthropic Opus 4.8 AI model, announced that Monero (XMR) has been added to the audit queue. He also plans to conduct security reviews on more privacy coin projects in the future.

Earlier, on May 29th, Hornby found a critical bug in the Zcash Orchard privacy pool. This vulnerability, unnoticed since May 2022, could theoretically allow an attacker to mint infinite undetectable fake ZEC. The development team at Shielded Labs released an emergency patch on June 1st and subsequently disclosed the details of the vulnerability.

Following the incident, ZEC experienced a 38% price drop within 24 hours of the announcement as the market feared that attackers might have exploited the bug to siphon funds from the privacy pool without leaving a trace on the blockchain.

Hornby mentioned that back in April this year, he was commissioned by the non-profit organization Shielded Labs to proactively identify protocol vulnerabilities before attackers. Despite having the opportunity to exploit the vulnerability for personal gain, he chose to report the issue to the development team, stating that he "cannot condone such betrayal."

Furthermore, Hornby plans to apply for Zcash community funding to support future security research efforts.