Zcash Founder: ZEC's Current Supply Can Be Locally Verified, No Inflation Vulnerability

July 30th, Zcash co-founder zooko (@zooko) stated in a post that concerns about a potential secret inflation of ZEC are unfounded. Anyone can independently verify on their local computer that the current total supply of ZEC is 16,848,458, without needing to wait for months.

In terms of background, Zcash is currently undergoing a protocol migration from Orchard to Ironwood. Some users mistakenly believed that they needed to wait for the migration to be completed to confirm if there was an inflation issue. In response, Boston Zcash pointed out that Zcash's "turnstile" mechanism is designed in such a way that 100% of Orchard funds will never all migrate to Ironwood (due to reasons such as lost private keys). Therefore, the "migration completion" itself is not the correct criterion to determine whether there has been inflation.