Are Monero Developers Behind the Latest Zcash Attack?

An unidentified spammer has wreaked havoc with Zcash node operators by filling transaction blocks with myriad shielded transaction outputs.

At press time, Zcash miners had verified a block with four shielded transaction outputs at a block height of 1832666, according to the blockchain’s explorer tool.

Twitter user xenumonero first pointed out the spammer’s activity:

The zcash spam attack continues. Almost every block contains a shielded transaction with hundreds of outputs. In doing so, the spammer can successfully blow up the size of the chain by maxing each 2mb block every 75 seconds. The cost of each spammed transaction? Less than a cent.
— xenu (@xenumonero) October 5, 2022

At press time, at least two out of five blocks had been maximally spammed with shielded transaction outputs, having sizes close to the two-megabyte limit. The size of the most recent block was roughly 1.4 megabytes.

While the motive of the attack has not yet been determined, bax1337 of Convex Labs believes that the goal is to bring Zcash into disrepute through nodes failing because of memory, performance, and synchronization issues. Additionally, potential node operators