ChainCatcher news, according to a post by Electric Coin, the company developing the Zcash protocol, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox will resign as CEO of Electric Coin and will continue to serve as a board member of the parent company Bootstrap Project. Electric Coin's former Senior Vice President of Growth, Josh Swihart, has become the new CEO.

ChainCatcher news, the Zcash protocol development company Electric Coin Company (ECC) stated in a community forum that the company is initiating a more decentralized process for facilitating Zcash-centered digital property ownership and management. These digital assets include the z.cash website, Zcash technical documentation center, Zcash Twitter account, Cypherpunk Zero website, and assets.The first phase will be to establish a transitional working group composed of ECC representatives and qualified community members. The working group is accepting applications from the community, with a deadline of September 15.The working group will be responsible for: establishing standards for assessing shared ownership models; facilitating open dialogue and idea exchange within the community; selecting the most suitable ownership model and owners based on community feedback; and developing a clear roadmap. This will outline expectations and responsibilities for the new structure, including transitional milestones such as the transfer or opening of technical infrastructure and the establishment of new governance mechanisms.

ChainCatcher news, Zcash developer Electronic Coin Company (ECC) announced a restructuring of the company, laying off 13 employees, about half of its team members.ECC stated that the bear market has impacted its financial situation, limiting its development. The restructuring will focus time and resources on key areas within Zcash, while other work will be transferred to the Zcash community.In the coming weeks, ECC will release a revised roadmap, focusing on empowering ZEC holders and giving them a voice. This includes: creating an excellent user experience for PoS ZEC; developing a wallet by Zcasher that anyone can easily use; a mobile wallet SDK that will be useful for other Zcash builders; and policy work in the U.S. to ensure that ZEC, self-custody, and staking remain viable in the U.S.ECC noted that recent work to address third-party wallet performance issues remains its current top priority, and ECC is committed to releasing zcash 5.6.0, an updated version of lightwalletd, and new iOS and Android mobile SDKs. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, focusing on multi-chain privacy, Layer1 blockchain Namada proposes to airdrop its upcoming Namada token NAM to holders of Zcash (ZEC). Among them, ZEC holders who choose to anonymously claim NAM will receive more airdrop than those who claim transparently.Both Namada and Zcash use zero-knowledge proof mechanisms to verify transactions without revealing the sender, receiver, or transaction amount.The Anoma Foundation, which is behind Namada, stated that the project will launch its mainnet in May 2023, after which the exact timing and mechanism of the airdrop will be finalized. The foundation is also responsible for managing the independent privacy-preserving protocol Anoma. (CoinDesk)

ChainCatcher news, blockchain security company Halborn stated that in March 2022, Halborn was hired to assess the Dogecoin open-source codebase for any vulnerabilities that could affect blockchain security. During this assessment, Halborn discovered several serious and exploitable vulnerabilities, which have since been fixed by the Dogecoin team. However, after a broader review, Halborn determined that the same vulnerabilities affected over 280 other networks, including Litecoin and Zcash, putting more than $25 billion in digital assets at risk. Halborn has codenamed this vulnerability "Rab13s."The Rab13s vulnerability was found in the P2P messaging mechanism of the affected networks. By exploiting this vulnerability, an attacker could send carefully crafted malicious consensus messages to various nodes, causing each node to shut down and ultimately putting the network at risk of a 51% attack and other serious issues. A second vulnerability in the RPC service allows attackers to crash nodes via RPC requests. However, successful exploitation requires valid credentials, which reduces the likelihood of risk to the entire network, as some nodes execute the stop command. The third vulnerability allows attackers to execute code in the context of a user running a node via RPC. However, the likelihood of this exploitation is lower, as it requires valid credentials to carry out the attack.Halborn stated that it has developed an exploit toolkit for Rab13s, which includes proof-of-concept with configurable parameters to demonstrate attacks on different networks. All necessary technical information has been shared with identified stakeholders to assist them in fixing the issues, and necessary patches have been released for the community and miners. For projects using UTXO-based nodes (such as Dogecoin), it is recommended to upgrade all nodes to the latest version (1.14.6). Due to the severity of the issue, Halborn will not be releasing further technical or exploit details at this time. (Source link)

According to Chain Catcher news and TheBlock report, unidentified attackers are attempting a spam transaction attack on the Zcash network, sending privacy transactions (Shielded) with hundreds of outputs to maximize block size. The aim may be to cause nodes to fail due to memory, performance, and synchronization issues, as well as to prevent potential node operators from entering the network.According to data from Blockchair, the blockchain size has surged dramatically, increasing from 31 GB in mid-June to over 100 GB currently. (Source link)

Chain Catcher news, Vitalik Buterin recently stated at the Mainnet conference that all blockchains hoping to scale, such as Dogecoin and Zcash, should follow Ethereum's lead and transition to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.When asked if similar merging activities would be executed, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said, "We have been observing and have realized from the Ethereum merge upgrade that migrating to PoS is really effective." (Decrypt)