Some long-time holders of ZEC find themselves unable to withdraw their assets, as the privacy token rallies to multi-year highs.
Long-time holders of Zcash (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.
In an X post 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.
Lopp explained that his Nano X and Ledger Live, a Ledger hardware wallet paired with its app, crashed during the transaction signing. However, it’s worth noting that Ledger isn’t the only crypto wallet that was apparently unable to support the older Zcash. Software wallets like Edge and Zashi wouldn’t accept his wallet’s birth date either, while Electrum, a desktop wallet used for Zcash and Bitcoin, no longer has any functioning servers at all, Lopp noted.
In a follow-up X post on Nov. 16, Lopp added that he had figured out why spending the 2017-era Zcash had become so difficult:
Ledger’s chief technology officer, Charles Guillemet, replied soon after, confirming in an X post on Nov. 16 that the crypto wallet provider doesn’t currently support certain “(very) old” ZEC transactions.
“Shielded ZEC transactions and some (very) old transparent transactions are not supported at the moment,” Guillemet wrote.
The Sapling Upgrade
The issue appears to go back to Zcash’s Sapling upgrade, which went live in October 2018. The update brought a new transaction format, and, per Zcash’s developer guide, required that “all transactions must use the new transaction format” after the update went live.
“Previous 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,” the Zcash developer guide reads.
While it’s 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.
Community Reaction
But users didn’t seem to buy the grant explanation. Many started questioning why a for-profit company, whose CEO Pascal Gauthier recently bragged that “revenues have hit triple-digit millions so far in 2025,” 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.
“So 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,” wrote an X user who goes by Vince in response to Guillemet’s statement.
The Defiant reached out to Ledger for comments on the matter, but hasn’t heard back by press time.
Meanwhile, ZEC is down over 10% on the day, trading around $600, per The Defiant’s price tracking page. Even with the correction, the token is still up more than 1,400% over the past three months, after a sharp, extended rally that started in late September of this year, and pushed the price from $55 to over $720, a level ZEC holders haven’t seen since 2018.
ZEC 3-month price chart. Source: CoinGeckoSource: https://thedefiant.io/news/infrastructure/ledger-draws-heat-as-pre-2018-zcash-holders-face-dropped-support
