Zcash Down? Block Explorers Show No New Blocks for Hours

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ZEC block explorers are showing no new block confirmations on the Zcash network for several hours. This has led to some people claiming the network is down. 

Zcash is a privacy coin built on top of Bitcoin’s codebase. It has a hard cap of 21 million tokens, cuts its block reward in half every four years, and runs on a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. The key difference of Zcash is that users can send their tokens to a shielded pool where they can no longer be tracked. You can read all about Zcash and why it is largely still trackable here. 

Using Arkham Intel, you can filter the transfers table so that it only shows transactions on the Zcash blockchain and the resulting table shows no transfers in over 5 hours:  

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Despite many block explorers showing the same outage, some commentators are claiming that the outage is due to a faulty node that provides data to the explorer applications. 

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Other websites - such as this ZEC Mining Pool site - appear to show Zcash blocks continuing to be mined.  

Another theory for the outage is that there was a recent network upgrade due to an Orchard pool vulnerability identified on May 29th and fixed on the evening of 1st June. Orchard is Zcash’s latest shielded pool. According to this theory, the block explorers are catching up after the network upgrade.

It is unclear why a network upgrade on the 1st June would cause an issue with block explorers on 3rd June but not prior to this date.

This is a developing story. We will update you as and when we know more.