Developers working on Zcash have set out a plan to protect its transparent payments against attacks from AI-driven cryptography breaks and future quantum computers.
The plan comes from Zakura, which builds a Zcash full node. “Here’s our plan for quantum-safe, unlinkable, rotating taddrs. Possible with Zcash, today,” the team posted on X on 8 October. An engineering post by Roman Akhtariev sets the goal as “full post-quantum safe transparent pools with hash based signatures.”
Why transparent payments
Zcash has two kinds of payment. Shielded transactions hide the sender, the recipient and the amount. Transparent transactions, which use addresses known as taddrs, are visible on-chain, much like Bitcoin. This plan covers the transparent side only.
On a transparent address, the public key is revealed once it sends funds. That exposure is the weakness security researchers have been warning about this week. Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said AI-driven maths could break the signature scheme behind those keys before quantum computers do, and urged holders to move funds to fresh addresses. Vitalik Buterin warned that AI could also weaken the lattice-based schemes designed to replace today’s keys, and said he prefers hash-based cryptography.
How it would work
Wallets would rotate to a fresh transparent address after every transaction, so public keys never sit exposed. Each payment would also carry a backup signature of a type called WOTS, which is hash-based and considered resistant to quantum attacks.
Rotating addresses normally creates a privacy problem, because a server checking balances can see which addresses belong to the same user. Zakura’s answer is private information retrieval, which lets a wallet fetch its records without revealing which ones it is asking for. That feature is rolling out this week in the Vizor wallet, under “private queries” in its settings.
“While others are worrying about the viability of rotating transparent addresses, we’re already solving linkability,” Zakura said.
When it lands
Zakura expects support for the new signature type to reach Zcash in January. No network activation date has been set.
The plan follows NU7, Zcash’s upcoming upgrade that cuts block times to 25 seconds. ZEC trades near $1,284, the 10th largest crypto by market value.
