Zano halts economic activity due to inflation bug, plans rollback

A bug that lets a blockchain silently mint extra coins is, in the hierarchy of crypto emergencies, about as serious as it gets. Zano, a privacy-focused layer-1 blockchain, found itself confronting exactly that problem on September 25, 2026, when the team publicly identified an inflation bug and ordered an immediate, network-wide halt to all economic activity. The project plans to roll back its blockchain by roughly 24 hours to excise the damage, and has committed to making affected users whole in the process. What happened and why it matters The bug is tied to Gateway Addresses, a feature introduced in Zano’s Hard Fork 6, which activated on mainnet at block 3,833,000 around August 26, 2026. Gateway Addresses were designed to smooth out service integrations while preserving the privacy guarantees Zano is built around. Somewhere in that new code, a flaw opened the door to unauthorized asset creation. For a project whose entire economic model rests on scarcity, the stakes are high. Zano operates on a fixed emission schedule with a 1 ZANO block reward, and every transaction fee is burned rather than paid to miners, a design meant to make the supply deflationary over time. An inflation ...