Answer first
Three numbers, one migration
As of 2026-08-06 16:52 UTC, 1,372,982 ZEC has crossed the turnstile into Ironwood since NU6.3 activated, the Ironwood pool holds 1,334,394 ZEC right now, and 32.8% of the ZEC that was sealed inside the Orchard pool at activation has migrated out of it. Those three sentences describe the same event and none of them is the same number. That is the entire reason public Ironwood dashboards disagree.
In the weeks after activation the published figures diverged badly — the same migration was being reported at scales that differed several times over, depending on which dashboard a reader happened to open. The cause was identified in the Zcash Community Forum thread Ironwood migration dashboards, opened by Zebraman on July 28, 2026: ironwood.zodl.com lists the balance present in Ironwood, while CipherScan and ironwood.live track the amount that migrated from Orchard into Ironwood. Different quantities, same headline word, and neither site says which it is publishing.
We have been on the receiving end of the same confusion. On August 4, 2026 a reader reported our Ironwood figure as a bug because a headline elsewhere announced a round-number "migrated" milestone while ZecStats showed less. Nothing was wrong: theirs was cumulative gross inflow, ours was the live pool balance, and the site was showing only one of the two without explaining the difference. The fix was to publish both, and then to write this page. For the live tracker itself — progress, rate, what to watch — see the Ironwood migration tracker; this page is the definitions and the reconciliation behind it.
Definitions
The three quantities, and why they can never be equal
Current Ironwood pool balance
1,334,394 ZEC — the ZEC sitting in the Ironwood pool at the chain tip. It moves in both directions: up as Orchard migrates in and as new value is shielded, down whenever ZEC is spent out to a transparent or Sapling destination. This is a stock, not a total.
Cumulative turnstile inflow
1,372,982 ZEC — everything that has ever entered Ironwood since block 3,428,143, summed across every crossing. It only ever rises, it never subtracts what later left, and it includes value that arrived from pools other than Orchard.
Spent back out
38,589 ZEC — value that entered Ironwood and has since been spent out again. This is the entire gap between the two figures above, and it is ordinary wallet activity rather than any kind of leakage.
The identity holds by construction, which is exactly why the two headline figures can never converge. The moment a single Ironwood note is spent outward, the balance falls below cumulative inflow and stays there; the moment a single transparent coin is shielded directly into Ironwood, the balance rises without anything having migrated. A tracker publishing the balance will read below one publishing cumulative inflow, permanently and correctly. Asking which is "the real Ironwood number" is asking the wrong question — the right question is which one answers what you wanted to know.
The Orchard side of the ledger has the same trap. Orchard remaining is a balance: 2,452,494 ZEC still sealed in the pool today. Migration progress is a ratio, and it is emphatically not a share of all ZEC — it is the share of the Orchard pool's own balance at the moment it sealed:
That denominator is itself derived rather than assumed. Sealed Orchard is exit-only through the turnstile, so nothing can leave it by any other route — which means Orchard's balance at activation must equal what is still in the pool plus everything that has crossed out of it. We recompute it on every refresh instead of pinning a constant, because a constant would silently rot: an earlier ZecStats build hardcoded an activation balance and the number was later shown to be impossible. The full derivation and its audit checks are in the methodology.
Provenance
Where the inflow actually came from
Not everything that entered Ironwood is migrated Orchard value, and this is the second independent reason "migrated" figures diverge. Ironwood is the pool where all new shielded activity now lands, so value arriving from Sapling notes and from transparent addresses is mixed in with the Orchard migration in any raw inflow total. Splitting gross inflow by the pool each crossing came from is the only way to isolate the migration itself.
- Migrated from sealed Orchard · 1,197,796 ZEC · 87.2%
- Shielded in from Sapling · 51,687 ZEC · 3.8%
- Shielded in from transparent · 121,199 ZEC · 8.8%
- Mixed / unattributed spends · 2,301 ZEC · 0.2%
Only the Orchard slice belongs in a migration percentage. Counting the rest would mean a wave of newly shielded ZEC — a demand signal, and a good one — reading on the dashboard as Orchard emptying faster, which it is not. The split comes from turnstile events indexed by an independent Zcash indexer running its own node; if that single source is unavailable, this section publishes — rather than an approximation, and nothing else on the site depends on it. Related: the Orchard pool.
Comparison
What each public tracker appears to measure
Below is our best like-for-like reading of the other public Ironwood dashboards. To be clear about the framing: these sites are not wrong. They are measuring different quantities, mostly without saying so, and a reader who assumes two dashboards answer the same question will conclude one of them is broken. Where we could not verify what a tracker measures — several render client-side or would not serve our fetch — the table says so rather than guessing.
| Tracker | Appears to publish | Why it differs from our figure |
|---|---|---|
| ironwood.zodl.com (Zodl / Zashi wallet team) | Current Ironwood pool balance | Same quantity as our 1,334,394 ZEC balance. Reads below any cumulative figure because it is net of the 38,589 ZEC spent back out. |
| cipherscan.app/ironwood | Cumulative amount migrated out of Orchard | Closest to our 1,197,796 ZEC Orchard-sourced line. Only ever rises. CipherScan is also our upstream for pool balances; we did not scrape its Ironwood page for this table, to stay inside its rate limit. |
| ironwood.live | Cumulative amount migrated (per the forum thread) | Unverified by us — the site did not complete a TLS handshake for our fetch, so the definition here is the forum thread's characterisation, not our own inspection. |
| zechub.wiki/dashboard | Per-pool charts (Sprout, Sapling, Orchard, Ironwood) | Unverified — the dashboard renders client-side and the served HTML exposes only the pool selector, so we could not confirm whether the series are balances or flows. |
| Blockworks Research | Zcash shielded-supply metrics | Unverified — we could not locate a public Ironwood-specific metric to compare against, so we make no claim about what it measures. |
The same forum thread also points to CyphZec.com, and more dashboards have appeared since. The useful takeaway is not a ranking, it is a habit: before comparing two Ironwood numbers, establish whether each is a balance or a cumulative total, and if it is a percentage, ask what sits in the denominator. Almost every apparent contradiction in this dataset resolves at that question. ZecStats publishes all three quantities together, with the as-of stamp bound to the instant the balances describe rather than to page-render time — during heavy migration the pool moves thousands of ZEC an hour, and an hour-old number presented as current is its own kind of wrong.
Why it matters
The turnstile is an audit — if you read it correctly
A sealed pool with a public turnstile makes shielded value auditable.
Why / details
Inside a shielded pool, balances are invisible by design: nobody can observe how much any participant holds, and no external observer can prove the pool's contents. A turnstile changes that at the boundary. Every exit from sealed Orchard reveals its amount publicly, while leaving sender identity shielded — so the total that comes out is measurable even though the pool never was. Ordinary shielded-to-shielded transfers offer no such vantage point.
The ledger of cumulative-in versus balance is where you would see a problem.
Why / details
The recurring question about any privacy pool is whether value could have been counterfeited inside it. The turnstile is the accounting checkpoint for exactly that: if more ZEC exited the sealed pool than consensus rules ever permitted to be in it, the books would fail to balance in public. The same discipline applies on the Ironwood side, where cumulative inflow minus spent-out must equal the live balance. Those identities are what our data audit checks every run — and misreading a cumulative figure as a balance breaks the reader's ability to run that check at all.
What this does not prove — stated plainly.
Why / details
A turnstile audit is a statement about value conservation at a pool boundary, not a proof that the retired cryptography was flawless, and it says nothing about a hypothetical bug that was never exercised. It also does not weaken privacy for individual holders: crossing amounts are public, but who moved them is not. ZecStats reports only what the chain publishes at pool boundaries and never estimates activity inside a shielded pool — see what we refuse to publish.
This is why the labelling problem is worth a page of its own rather than a footnote. The migration is one of the few moments when a large body of shielded ZEC becomes publicly measurable, and the measurement is only meaningful if everyone reading it agrees on what is being counted. Our raw figures are available at /api/zec/summary and in bulk on the data downloads page, so any of this can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Live
Rate and completion
The two 24-hour figures are deliberately separate and will rarely agree. Migrated from Orchard · 24h is the fall in the sealed pool's balance — value genuinely leaving Orchard. Ironwood inflow · 24h is the rise in the Ironwood pool, which also captures new shielding and is net of anything spent back out on the same day. Quoting either one as "ZEC migrated today" without saying which is how a daily rate ends up wrong by a wide margin. Completion, meanwhile, is measured against the sealed pool: 32.8% of the 3,650,290 ZEC sealed in Orchard at activation has now crossed.
Where a 24-hour figure reads —, that is deliberate. Upstream baselines for pool deltas have been observed to shift under us — one such contradiction understated a daily move by orders of magnitude — so when the available deltas disagree with our own recorded history, ZecStats withholds the number and raises a warning instead of publishing whichever value happened to arrive. The gap closes on its own once our own snapshot history spans the full window. The same policy governs every — on this page.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
How much ZEC has migrated to Ironwood?
Two honest answers, because two things are being counted. 1,197,796 ZEC has crossed the turnstile out of the sealed Orchard pool — that is "migrated" in the strict sense, and it works out to 32.8% of the 3,650,290 ZEC that was sealed inside Orchard when the pool closed. Counting everything that has entered Ironwood from any pool, gross inflow is 1,372,982 ZEC. The Ironwood pool itself holds 1,334,394 ZEC right now, which is lower again because 38,589 ZEC has since been spent back out.
Why do Ironwood trackers show different numbers?
Because they publish different quantities under the same word. ironwood.zodl.com shows the current Ironwood pool balance; CipherScan and ironwood.live show the cumulative amount migrated out of Orchard. A balance moves in both directions and is net of spends; a cumulative figure only ever rises and ignores what left. Neither is wrong, and neither site labels which one it is. This was first spelled out by Zebraman in the Zcash Community Forum thread "Ironwood migration dashboards" on July 28, 2026.
Is the Orchard pool empty yet?
No. 2,452,494 ZEC is still sitting in sealed Orchard, and 32.8% of the pool's balance at activation has crossed into Ironwood. Sealed pools drain on a long tail — Sprout still holds 22,637 ZEC eight years after it closed — so expect the last of Orchard to take years, with no deadline announced.
What is the Orchard turnstile?
A turnstile is the one-way exit from a sealed shielded pool. When NU6.3 sealed Orchard, the only spend the consensus rules still permit from an Orchard note is one that moves value out into Ironwood, and the amount crossing the boundary is revealed publicly even though the sender stays shielded. That is what makes the migration auditable: the total that comes out through the turnstile can never exceed the total that was inside.
Did NU6.3 change Zcash's supply?
No. NU6.3 opened a fifth shielded pool and sealed the fourth; it did not mint, burn, or reissue any ZEC. Migration moves value between pools, so pool balances change while total supply follows the same emission schedule it always has. A tracker quoting cumulative turnstile inflow as if it were a pool balance can make Ironwood look larger than it is, but that is a labelling artefact, not new coins.
Why is the Ironwood pool balance smaller than the total migrated?
Because ZEC that entered Ironwood can be spent again. 1,372,982 ZEC has crossed in since activation, 38,589 ZEC has since left, and the pool holds 1,334,394 ZEC today. Cumulative inflow minus spent-out equals the balance, by construction — the gap is ordinary shielded spending, not a discrepancy.
Is everything in Ironwood migrated from Orchard?
No, and that is the second reason naive "migrated" figures diverge. Of the 1,372,982 ZEC that has entered Ironwood, 1,197,796 ZEC came from sealed Orchard; the remainder was shielded straight in from Sapling and transparent addresses and was never in Orchard at all. Measuring progress as Ironwood ÷ (Ironwood + Orchard) counts that new shielding as migration and overstates how far along the migration is.
Which number does ZecStats publish?
All three, side by side, with the denominator named. Migration progress is Orchard-sourced turnstile inflow divided by Orchard's balance at activation (3,650,290 ZEC), which is derived from the chain each refresh rather than hardcoded. The live tracker is at /ironwood, the raw figures are in /api/zec/summary, and every source is documented at /methodology.
Keep reading: the live Ironwood tracker · the Orchard pool · Zcash shielded pools · what share of ZEC is shielded · methodology and sources · data downloads.