Taylor Hornby, the security engineer who used Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 AI model to find a critical flaw in Zcash, says privacy coin Monero is among the tokens he plans to audit next.
Asked on X if he could look for flaws in Monero and other private cryptocurrencies, Hornby replied: “Absolutely! I’ll add Monero to my queue of things to audit.”
Monero, which trades under the ticker XMR, is among the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies and hides transaction details by default, compared to Zcash, where users can either be transparent or shielded.
Hornby found the Zcash bug on May 29. The flaw in blockchain’s Orchard privacy pool had remained undetected since May 2022 and could have allowed an attacker to make unlimited, undetectable fake ZEC. Shielded Labs, a nonprofit developer of the network, disclosed it Thursday and implemented an emergency fix by June 1.
Zcash fell 38% over the following 24 hours due to fallout and concerns about a hacker possibly stealing money from the shielded pool – without leaving a traceable trail – over the past few years.
Hornby, hired by Shielded Labs in April to find protocol flaws before attackers could, said he reported the bug rather than exploiting it because the Zcash developers were “like family” and he “couldn’t live with that kind of betrayal.”
He plans to apply for a Zcash coin holder grant to fund further work.
