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Some long-time holders of ZEC find themselves unable to withdraw their assets, as the privacy token rallies to multi-year highs.<\/p>\n
Long-time holders of Zcash<\/a> (ZEC), with coins from 2018 or earlier, are facing issues transferring their asset from Ledger crypto wallets, leaving some early adopters unable to cash out their ZEC as prices soar to multi-year highs. <\/p>\n In an X post<\/a> on Nov. 15, Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp noted that he had run into a surprising roadblock while trying to move some old ZEC. Lopp said that he had tried to transfer ZEC sitting in a wallet from 2017, only to discover that almost every tool he tested had issues, making it impossible to spend his ZEC. <\/p>\n Lopp explained that his Nano X and Ledger Live, a Ledger hardware wallet paired with its app, crashed during the transaction signing. However, it\u2019s worth noting that Ledger isn\u2019t the only crypto wallet that was apparently unable to support the older Zcash. Software wallets like Edge and Zashi wouldn\u2019t accept his wallet\u2019s birth date either, while Electrum, a desktop wallet used for Zcash and Bitcoin, no longer has any functioning servers at all, Lopp noted. <\/p>\n In a follow-up X post<\/a> on Nov. 16, Lopp added that he had figured out why spending the 2017-era Zcash had become so difficult:<\/p>\n \u201cUpdate: if you have really old ZEC UTXOs created before 2018, they have to be spent with a \u2018version 1\u2019 transaction… and Ledger removed support for it. Ledger broke the ability for early adopters to spend ZEC. Wow. Dumbfounded.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Ledger\u2019s chief technology officer, Charles Guillemet, replied soon after, confirming in an X post<\/a> on Nov. 16 that the crypto wallet provider doesn\u2019t currently support certain \u201c(very) old\u201d ZEC transactions.<\/p>\n \u201cShielded ZEC transactions and some (very) old transparent transactions are not supported at the moment,\u201d Guillemet wrote.<\/p>\n The issue appears to go back to Zcash\u2019s Sapling upgrade<\/a>, which went live in October 2018. The update brought a new transaction format, and, per Zcash\u2019s developer guide, required that \u201call transactions must use the new transaction format\u201d after the update went live.<\/p>\n \u201cPrevious formats will not be valid after the Sapling upgrade, so if you create transactions, the v4 format must be used after the upgrade has activated (but not until then). Hardware wallets and SPV clients are particularly affected here,\u201d the Zcash developer guide reads<\/a>.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s unclear why Ledger stopped supporting that functionality all together, Guillemet stated in his response on X that the company is planning to reinstate support by Q2 2026, and had recently applied for a grant with the ZCash Foundation to do so.<\/p>\n But users didn\u2019t seem to buy the grant explanation. Many started<\/a> questioning<\/a> why a for-profit company, whose CEO Pascal Gauthier recently bragged<\/a> that \u201crevenues have hit triple-digit millions so far in 2025,\u201d and which is considering a U.S. IPO or private funding next year, would need outside cash to restore a feature that no longer works on its devices.<\/p>\n \u201cSo by your own admission its a feature that used to be there but now isn’t, yet you need a grant instead of idk using the profits from the people you sold a working product to and let fall into disarray,\u201d wrote<\/a> an X user who goes by Vince in response to Guillemet\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n The Defiant reached out to Ledger for comments on the matter, but hasn\u2019t heard back by press time.<\/p>\nThe Sapling Upgrade<\/h2>\n
Community Reaction<\/h2>\n