Zcash (ZEC) rallied 25% over the past 24 hours after founder Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn announced that Anthropic had completed a security audit of the Zcash protocol using its Mythos AI model and found no serious vulnerabilities.

The review was conducted at the request of Shielded Labs, a key contributor to the Zcash ecosystem, Wilcox-O’Hearn said.

Thanks, Anthropic, for helping protect Zcash users. At Shielded Labs’s request, they ran a security audit of Zcash with Mythos. It did not find any more serious bugs in the Zcash protocol. Shielded Labs and others are continuing security hardening work. Stay tuned for updates.

— zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ (@zooko) June 12, 2026

ZEC traded above $530 at press time, up nearly 30% following Wilcox-O’Hearn’s statement. The asset has also posted a dramatic long-term gain, rising more than 1,100% over the past year.

From emergency patch to AI-powered all-clear

The timeline matters here. On June 3-5, 2026, Zcash executed an emergency soft fork to patch a critical forgery vulnerability in its Orchard shielded pool. The bug had been quietly sitting in the codebase since approximately 2022, meaning it existed for roughly four years before anyone caught it.

That disclosure hammered ZEC’s price by approximately 40%. There was no evidence the vulnerability had been exploited before the fix.

On June 12-13, Wilcox announced on X that Shielded Labs had requested a security audit from Anthropic’s Mythos, a cybersecurity-focused AI model. The result: no new serious or critical bugs found, beyond the previously identified and already-patched issue.

Why an AI audit moved the market this much

A 25% price jump off a security audit is unusual, even by crypto standards. First, the market was pricing in fear. A 40% drop on the forgery bug disclosure meant ZEC was trading at a significant discount to where it had been just weeks prior.

Second, the auditor matters. Anthropic isn’t some random smart contract auditing firm. It’s one of the most prominent AI safety companies in the world, and Mythos is positioned as a frontier model specifically oriented toward cybersecurity applications.

The bigger picture for AI in crypto security

What happened with Zcash compressed the typical post-incident recovery cycle into roughly a week. The bug was patched June 3-5. The AI audit was announced June 12-13. The market repriced almost immediately.

There’s also a competitive angle for privacy coins specifically. Zcash’s entire value proposition rests on the cryptographic integrity of its shielded pools. A four-year-old forgery bug in Orchard was an existential-level credibility threat. The Mythos audit doesn’t just help the price recover. It helps the project’s narrative recover, which for a privacy coin is arguably more important.