Zcash is nearing completion of its mathematical proof to prevent hidden issuance vulnerabilities; ZEC rises 12%.
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Zcash's new privacy pool, Ironwood, will employ formal verification to eradicate undetectable proliferation vulnerabilities.
Mars Finance reports that the Zcash development team has announced plans to introduce formal verification through the upcoming new privacy pool, Ironwood, to eliminate the risk of "undetectable issuance vulnerabilities" through mathematical proof. Previously, it was reported that while the vulnerability in the Orchard shielding pool had been patched and there was no evidence of exploitation, the community decided to launch the new Ironwood shielding pool and conduct comprehensive formal verification of its protocol because it is theoretically impossible to confirm whether covert issuance has occurred through on-chain history.
Theorem proofs are also starting to come down to cost: Mistral open-sourced Leanstral 1.5, costing about $4 per problem.
According to Beating's monitoring, Mistral AI has open-sourced Leanstral 1.5, a model for Lean 4 formal proofs. The model has a total of 119 billion parameters, with approximately 6.5 billion activation parameters. It is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and offers a free API. Official evaluations show that Leanstral 1.5 solved 587 out of 672 problems on PutnamBench; it achieved 87% and 34% on the abstract algebra benchmarks FATE-H and FATE-X respectively, setting new best performance records for similar models. The average solution cost of Leanstral 1.5 on PutnamBench is approximately $4, lower than the tens to hundreds of dollars cost of some previous systems. As the token budget per problem increases, the number of problems it solves continues to increase; in the AVL tree complexity proof, the model completed the proof after more than 2.7 million token inferences and 22 instances of context compression. In addition to mathematical proofs, Leanstral 1.5 was also used for code verification. The team discovered 11 real bugs in 57 open-source Rust repositories, 5 of which had not been previously reported.
The Zcash Ironwood upgrade will be deployed to the testnet tomorrow.
According to Foresight News , Zcash core developer Sean Bowe tweeted that the Ironwood upgrade will be deployed to the testnet tomorrow. He also stated that the Ironwood upgrade will be activated on the mainnet around July 21st. All consensus rule changes have been implemented and have undergone a period of auditing. The specification/ZIP has been released and is nearing its final state. According to a previous Foresight News report, Zcash core developer Sean Bowe tweeted that Ironwood will introduce a new shielded pool using the Orchard protocol. Simultaneously, the Orchard circuit will add a flag controllable by consensus rules, which can disable payments to other users within the pool (while retaining change) as a privacy protection mechanism. After the upgrade, old Orchard pools will enable this restriction and prohibit fund transfers to old pools by constraining valueBalance. New user payments must be made through the new pool, while migrating funds from the old pool to the new pool is encouraged. Furthermore, users can gradually prove that no fraudulent minting has occurred by migrating funds.
Anthropic admitted that Claude Code had embedded steganography code targeting Chinese users, calling it an "abuse prevention experiment," and promised to roll back the code tomorrow.
According to Beating's monitoring, Thariq, an engineer on Anthropic's Claude Code team, publicly responded to the recent controversial "spy code" leak. He admitted that in March of this year, an experimental mechanism was embedded in the product. This mechanism detected whether the system timezone was Asia/Shanghai or Asia/Urumqi, whether the proxy hostname matched a list of Chinese resellers, and the keyword "AI Lab," and used special punctuation marks to inject hidden marker information into system prompts in a steganographic manner. He stated that the mechanism was intended to "prevent unauthorized resellers from abusing accounts and model distillation," but emphasized that the team has since implemented stronger protective measures and "has always intended to take it offline." The relevant PR has been merged, and it is expected to be completely rolled back in tomorrow's version release. This leak was made public on June 30 by the security account @IntCyberDigest, accompanied by two screenshots of code showing that Claude Code performed environmental fingerprinting on Chinese users without their knowledge. While Thariq's response was a direct admission, the timeline of "launching in March and only accelerating its withdrawal after being exposed" has still sparked widespread skepticism within the community. The comments section almost unanimously criticized Anthropic for "only announcing its withdrawal after being caught" and "secretly monitoring users without notifying them," severely damaging the company's long-standing image of "prioritizing security and ethics." --------------------------------- Click the original link below to join the Beating · Lark AI news channel for 24/7 monitoring of global AI hot topics and news.
Anthropic responded to the Claude Code accusation of containing hidden code to detect Chinese users: It is true, and a complete rollback will be implemented tomorrow.
According to Foresight News , Thariq Shihipar, a member of the Claude Code team, responded to the issue of Anthropic embedding hidden code in Claude Code targeting Chinese users, stating that the mechanism was an "experimental" measure launched by the team in March 2026 to prevent unauthorized account resale and prevent model distillation attacks. The team has since deployed stronger mitigation measures and originally planned to take the experiment offline; the relevant PRs have been merged and will be fully rolled back in the new version released on July 2, 2026.
Researchers propose Zcash-style private Bitcoin transfers without a soft fork
Shielded Bitcoin would use zero-knowledge proofs and encrypted notes to hide transaction details without changing Bitcoin consensus, but researchers have raised questions about anonymity and quantum resistance.