AI-armed researcher targets Monero after Zcash's 38% crash!

Taylor Hornby, the security engineer who used Anthropic's Opus 4.8 AI model to uncover a critical four-year-old bug in Zcash, has confirmed Monero (XMR) is next on his audit list. Hornby replied directly on X: "Absolutely! I'll add Monero to my queue of things to audit."

Why it matters

The Zcash flaw, buried in the Orchard privacy pool since May 2022, could have allowed an attacker to mint unlimited, undetectable counterfeit ZEC without leaving any trace. Shielded Labs — the nonprofit that hired Hornby in April specifically to find protocol-level bugs before attackers could — disclosed the vulnerability on May 29 and pushed an emergency fix through by June 1. Zcash dropped 38% in the 24 hours that followed. The episode has sharpened fears across the security community that similarly dormant vulnerabilities may be hiding in other privacy-coin codebases — and in traditional financial infrastructure — waiting for a sufficiently capable AI model to surface them.

Market impact

Monero is the largest privacy coin by market cap and hides transaction details by default, making any confirmed vulnerability structurally more severe than the Zcash case. Hornby plans to seek a Zcash coinholder grant to fund the broader audit programme. If his AI-assisted methodology surfaces a comparable flaw in XMR, the market reaction could be sharper still — Monero's user base skews toward participants who depend on its privacy guarantees, meaning confidence erosion hits harder and faster.