How Zcash Plans to Hide Your Keys From AI and Quantum Attacks

In brief

• Zakura said its team expects post-quantum signature opcodes to land in Zcash in January, enabling hash-based signatures for the network’s transparent payments.
• Its approach pairs address rotation with private information retrieval, a feature arriving this week in the Vizor wallet, so servers can’t link a user’s addresses.
• The plan follows Ethereum researcher Justin Drake’s “bunker mode” warning. It covers only transparent payments, and no network activation date has been confirmed.

While much of crypto is still debating “bunker mode,” one team of Zcash developers says it already has a plan.

Zakura, which builds a Zcash full node, said its team expects post-quantum signature opcodes to land in Zcash in January. Opcodes are low-level instructions that would let the network verify a new type of signature.

The goal, according to an engineering post by Roman Akhtariev, is “full post-quantum safe transparent pools with hash based signatures.”

Zcash supports two kinds of payments: shielded ones that hide the sender, recipient and amount, and transparent ones that are publicly visible, much as they are on Bitcoin. A transparent address contains a hash of a public key, which stays hidden until the owner spends from it and reveals the key onchain.