Ironwood: Verifying the Soundness of Zcash’s Circulating Supply

General
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I think we’re talking about two different things. You’re focused on what’s required for Ironwood to activate. We’re also thinking about what a successful upgrade looks like from a user perspective.

I agree that Ironwood can successfully activate if the major mining pools migrate. But I’d view that as the minimum threshold, not the goal. If major exchanges or wallets aren’t ready, many users could be unable to deposit, withdraw, or access their funds. That’s likely to create confusion for users and undermine confidence in the upgrade.

That’s why we’re talking with certain exchanges and wallet partners to help them prepare. The question we should be discussing is how much disruption we’re willing to accept in order to upgrade on the current timeline. From our perspective, protecting users is part of a successful upgrade.

We all agree Ironwood should activate as quickly as possible. The question is how to balance the risk of the Orchard vulnerability being exploited before Ironwood activates against the operational risk of rushing the migration. Based on our initial assessment and everything we’ve seen over the past month, we believe the likelihood of the Orchard vulnerability being exploited is low, while the operational risks of compressing the timeline are significant. That’s why we’re advocating for a path that we believe minimizes overall risk to users.

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Of course the likelihood of Orchard vulnerability is low, however @zooko in his esteemed position as “Zcash Founder” and spokesperson of Shielded Labs has created a market panic by advising users to withdraw their funds from Orchard, which caused ZEC to lose 50% of its value within 2 days.

The solution proposed to fix this: Ironwood! Very exciting, everyone is in support, and the market responded positively to this news! A bunch of teams worked very hard to get it ready as the market is clearly spooked by your team’s creation of FEAR, UNCERTAINTY and DOUBT.

Now, on the eve of a functioning testnet, you have the nerve to come in and try to slow down this deployment which your team advocated for only last month!?

And yet again, Zooko creates a panic, which, because Zooko is the “Zcash Founder”, all the crypto news outlets report on.

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More FEAR, UNCERTAINTY and DOUBT.

“You are talking” to certain exchanges and wallets, but who exactly? How many users do they have? How much ZEC do they represent?

And who are you to represent Zcash to them? I’m pretty sure that myself or any of the other orgs in the ecosystem are also in touch with the very same exchanges and wallets, the list is not long. And in fact, I think I, or anyone else, can get them ready faster than you can, so why don’t you just step aside and stop blocking everyone else?

And while you are at it - Shielded Labs could kindly stop farming attention by being Zcash’s number 1 source of FUD.

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From my perspective,

We should activate Ironwood as soon as possible and there are no indications that there is any reason for delay. Sean Bowe on X: "UPDATE: Over the last couple weeks we've made huge progress on Ironwood activation in Zcash! 1. All of the consensus rule changes have been implemented, and have been undergoing auditing for some time now. Specifications / ZIPs are published and nearing their final state. 2." / X

Most of the hash power is already on zebrad.

Consumer wallet tools for migration are in development and focused on improving turnstile privacy by splitting notes and scheduling incremental transfers to max privacy.

ZODL and ZF are in direct contact and coordinating with all major mining pools and exchanges. Good progress. Valor built a wrapper for the zcashd wallet if needed but Zallet is in good shape.

Wallet support for Ironwood at exchanges is irrelevant as they don’t use shielded addresses.

Any extension of zcashd EOS is risky given its complexity and attack surface. The ZODL team understands the zcashd code better than anyone.

The forcing function of dates/block height aligns incentives across the ecosystem.

Hiccups are possible. But nothing consequential. All the core devs are confident and at the ready.

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A bit off-topic, but I’ve never seen anything wrong with weeding out uncertain holders along the way. Because it is the confident Zodlers (not speculators) who are the key to Zcash’s long-term success and steady price growth without stressful, painful pullbacks.

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Cipherscan is ready on testnet.

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checks the current price of ZEC

Maybe “BREAKING: Zcash devs working together to ensure smooth upgrade!” is a bullish narrative. :wink:

This has happened before, actually. We originally announced that Zcash would be released September 28, 2016, and then as that deadline got closer, we realized there wouldn’t be enough time to get security audits done and published, and have time to fix any issues that those audits might bring up. So, we announced that the launch of Zcash would be set back one month, from September 28 to October 28. I was concerned that this announcement would trigger FUD, but it turned out that instead we got lots of positive feedback about being careful and communicating what was going on. And the rest is history. :slight_smile:

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P.S. One more comment on this and then I’m going to let it lie. The problem with allocating credit and blame for price action is that it is always possible to tell a story in which your narrative is the cause every time the price goes up, and the other guy’s narrative is the cause every time the price goes down. David Deutsch has this great idea in “The Beginning of Infinity” that good explanations need to be hard to vary. That’s the problem with explanations of ZEC price movements — they’re easy to vary, so people can always come up with an explanation that sounds true but might not be.

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@zooko the security first posture is exactly what this moment calls for. Hunting bugs before production and helping pools and exchanges migrate safely is the unglamorous work that makes Ironwood worth shipping. Thank you for holding that line.

@thowar2 I appreciate the counter perspective, and the urgency is real. Two implementations reaching testnet this fast is impressive work. But security has to take precedence over the calendar. Shipping consensus code before the audits finish is not how production software gets done. It just is not. A few extra weeks costs us patience. A bug in the supply soundness fix costs the entire point of the upgrade.

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I guess that, technically, FOMO is a subset of FUD. :smile:

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Focusing on fiat price is a wrong metric and an unhealthy habit. People still don’t get it but they will in due time…

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Just so stories are hard to avoid in evolutionary biology and financial markets. I have a lot of experience in the former.

We tend to like best the explanation that best fits our prior commitments because it feels intuitive. But that distracts from remembering to ask what evidence would distinguish it from its competitors.

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Thank you for the detailed explanation, Zooko.

One thing I really appreciate is that the goal isn’t simply to fix a vulnerability, but to restore something fundamental: the ability for anyone to independently verify the integrity of Zcash’s circulating supply.

As someone working to introduce Zcash to new communities, I believe this kind of transparency makes education much easier and helps build long-term confidence in the ecosystem.

Looking forward to seeing Ironwood move forward.

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You are correct, my post is an oversimplification a complex market reaction. But here’s a few facts:

  • Your post resulted in a large number of publications and “breaking news” type accounts quoting you, roughly paraphrased as “Zcash founder recommends exiting from the Shielded pool”
  • It seems the market very much does not like the possibility of soundness bugs, as evidenced by the 50% market drop.

Those two events resulted in the Ironwood effort, an emergency Network Upgrade which includes heavily auditing and formally verifying the Orchard code, then migrating Orchard to Ironwood as a supply audit that proves ZEC is still Sound.

This effort delayed many other efforts within the ecosystem including the much delayed NU7, but it was necessary due to the market signaling uneasiness with the possibility of a soundness bug. Did you make the market feel this way? You are right that I can’t conclusively claim that.

What has happened since then? Everyone in Zcash audited every line of code. Multiple auditors checked every line of code. AI, including Mythos, has audited every line of code. Every circuit the affects soundness has been formally verified, for the first time in history.

Zcash devs are working together to ensure a smooth upgrade! Except for Shielded Labs.

No, despite all the immense effort to triple and quadruple check the security of Ironwood, Shielded Labs wants to add further delays for vague and made up “security reasons”. An excuse you can make up infinitely.

And what is the real reason for that?

Apparently Shielded Labs has decided that they should build a new zcashd wallet for exchanges to run. On the latest Arborist call, Shielded Labs communicated that it needs more time to prepare this new zcashd implementation.

In the post above, @aquietinvestor misrepresents the status of zcashd support in NU6.3, and in fact Project Tachyon, Valar Group, Zcash Foundation, and ZODL have ALREADY coordinated with said exchanges on working wallet code for NU6.3.

So this entire “security concern” appears very much to look like an attempt to insert Shielded Labs into exchange workflows that are already solved!

Concern trolling in public against your own team is very much NOT “Zcash devs working together to ensure smooth upgrade!” - but is in fact causing CONFUSION as your team puts out mixed messaging.

I very much appreciate the work your team has done to find and fix REAL bugs this year, we absolutely need that work. I think it’s great your team is taking on that role. But the Zcash community can not tolerate constant concern trolling from preventing progress on the numerous structural issues Zcash urgently needs to correct.

Don’t let your role as a security drive your incentives to be a blocker to progress.

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Yes I agree with you @ZKZeek - however @aquietinvestor is misrepresenting the facts in this case.

Every single internal team has audited the code several times over. Several 3rd party audits have already been completed. Some 3rd party audits are still underway. Formal Verification of the circuits is complete. The timeline is ahead of schedule. The abundance of caution has already been applied.

No one is suggest shipping code before the last audits are complete. Of course if a bug is found, the code will be fixed and not rolled out.

Every other team working on this is giving a green light on security. Each of these teams has historically been conservative on security concerns.

Shielded Labs has 0 basis for suggesting more time is needed to ensure the security of Ironwood rollout. They are gaslighting the community with this posture.

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I see the argument that you’re making. I see all of the valid and critical pieces of the work (being done by all participants) that you’re documenting and bringing to the conversation.

I especially see your enthusiasm here for this project and ecosystem. Making sure that we continue to move fast and at the same time maintain a decentralized construct, in all areas, is important.

These last two posts were a lot more constructive. Try to not have accusing framing because it can diminish all the valid points you’re making.

We are all actually on the same team. I see your concerns. Lets work as a community to figure out how to deliver the highest level of security, as fast as possible.

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The ironwood effort will probably go down as one of the best things that’s ever happened to Zcash. It’s an historical event, the “AI hardening” of the most important cypherpunk project of our time. It’s connected with the story of Fable and regulation, and with the day that we stopped having to trade off privacy for auditability.

If you want to pin that glory on the team’s response to the market responding to Zooko and Jason telling everyone the truth about the situation with Orchard, then essentially you are calling them heroes: whistleblowers and instigators of positive change. That’s what your narrative implies.

Personally, I think they were just participating in normal responsible disclosure. (They certainly didn’t recommend exiting—quite the contrary!) Calling a fire a fire is not the same as setting one. If acknowledging weaknesses in a privacy system is considered disloyal, then that to me says something troubling about the culture. Penalising honesty about flaws and caution about shipping fixes distorts incentives.

The on-record reason for that was not vague or imaginary—it seemed pretty concrete to me. But it’s fine to disagree on delaying. There’s a huge difference between arguing that we don’t in fact need delays—maybe it’s true!—and accusing community members of bad faith for suggesting it. Everyone here is working towards the goal of regaining trust.

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I don’t believe I’ve misrepresented the facts, and I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate about Shielded Labs’ motives or assume bad faith instead of focusing on the substance of the discussion. Let’s focus on the facts and how we can make Ironwood a success for Zcash.

I wrote the post to answer a request for a status update that I was tagged in. I responded from Shielded Labs’ perspective and started by saying I couldn’t speak for the other teams. My goal was to explain how we’re currently thinking about the rollout, the migration away from zcashd, and what we’ve been hearing from the infrastructure partners we’ve spoken with.

We recognize the progress that’s been made on Ironwood and the work that’s gone into it. In my original post, I wrote that the teams had “made significant progress over the past several weeks,” that development was “moving forward on schedule,” and that formal verification was continuing before activation.

With regard to audits, my point wasn’t about whether audit work is already underway. It was that, once development is complete, we’d prefer to see the final production implementations of Ironwood and the Z3 components complete their independent third-party security audits before recommending them for production deployment.

The migration away from zcashd is also making progress. However, key components of the Z3 stack are still being completed. I wasn’t suggesting that no migration path exists. Rather, my point was that regardless of which migration path partners choose, there is additional work required before the migration is complete. Zallet is in alpha, Zaino is still under development, and mining pools, exchanges, and wallet teams must integrate, test, and deploy a solution, whether that’s the Z3 stack or an alternative like Dev’s wrapper.

I also acknowledged that ZODL and the Zcash Foundation have been leading outreach to mining pools and exchanges. I didn’t say there wasn’t working code or that exchanges hadn’t been contacted.

So I don’t think we’re disagreeing about the facts. We’re disagreeing about how to balance the risks associated with the current rollout. My concern isn’t just whether Ironwood can activate on schedule. It’s also whether coupling that activation with the migration away from zcashd creates unnecessary operational risk for users and infrastructure partners. I think it’s reasonable for us to discuss whether that coupling is the best path, or whether there’s a better way to minimize overall risk while still activating Ironwood as quickly as possible. You may disagree with that conclusion, but that’s a disagreement about judgment, not a misrepresentation of the facts.

Happy 250th Independence Day, everyone! :united_states:

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