Zcash deposits and withdrawals paused ahead of NU6.2 mainnet upgrade

If you tried moving your ZEC today and hit a wall, you’re not alone. Multiple cryptocurrency exchanges have paused Zcash deposits and withdrawals ahead of the network’s NU6.2 mainnet upgrade, scheduled to resume services after the activation completes tomorrow at 9am ET.

Exchanges including Bitget and Blofin are among the platforms that temporarily suspended ZEC transactions to protect users during the transition period, a standard playbook when blockchain networks undergo hard forks.

What NU6.2 actually fixes

NU6.2 is a hard fork designed to fix a severe soundness bug discovered in Zcash’s Orchard shielded transaction circuit. The upgrade activates at mainnet block height 3,364,600. Once live, it re-enables Orchard functionalities with a freshly updated circuit and a new verifying key, essentially replacing the compromised component with a patched version.

The Zcash Foundation released two pieces of software to handle the situation. Zebra version 4.5.3 served as an emergency soft fork, a quick temporary fix. Zebra version 5.0.0 is the full NU6.2 activation package that goes live with the hard fork.

Brief hiccups, but no breakdown

Initial reports following the NU6.2 activation process flagged temporary delays in block production, which were clarified as node synchronization issues rather than an outright network failure.

Zcash itself has been through this before. NU5 activated in May 2022, and NU6 followed in November 2024. Each upgrade brought temporary trading pauses at various platforms, followed by service resumption once the network stabilized.

ZEC price shrugs off the volatility script

Despite the kind of event that might normally spook traders, ZEC posted an 8% price gain over the week surrounding the upgrade, with recent trading near $590.

For traders, the immediate concern is liquidity. With deposits and withdrawals frozen across multiple platforms, order book depth on ZEC pairs may be thinner than usual. That can amplify price moves in either direction once services resume and pent-up transaction demand flows through.

The Zcash community is already in governance discussions about NU7, the next major upgrade on the roadmap. For investors evaluating ZEC’s long-term positioning, the real signal isn’t the bug itself. It’s the remediation speed and the market’s reaction to it, and whether post-upgrade adoption of Orchard shielded transactions recovers to pre-pause levels.