Medium · published August 19, 2026
ZEBRA is a Zcash node written entirely in Rust. Prior to 4.5.0, a natural or attacker-influenced chain fork can leave stale Sapling and Orchard note-commitment subtree roots in Zebra state. In zebra-state/src/service/non_finalized_state/chain.rs, Chain::pop_tip removed a reverted tip block but did not remove subtree entries whose end_height belonged to that block, unlike the cleanup performed by pop_root. When the winning fork later finalized, the abandoned branch's stale subtree data could be written to RocksDB and survive node restarts. The corrupted history can cause z_getsubtreesbyindex consumers such as lightwalletd and light wallets to receive incorrect subtree roots, producing wallet synchronization failures or incorrect wallet state and requiring a full state rebuild for recovery. This issue is fixed in version 4.5.0.