Zcash sets January target for quantum-resistant payments

Zcash developers plan to add post-quantum, hash-based signature opcodes in January, Roman Akhtariev wrote in an engineering post for Zakura, one of the programs used to run the Zcash network and validate transactions. No network activation date has been confirmed.

• The upgrade initially targets transparent payments, which hold roughly seven in 10 issued ZEC (about 11.96M of 16.98M); shielded payments require separate safeguards.
• Hash-based signatures would prevent an attacker from working backward from a public key to forge a wallet owner's approval and spend their coins.
• The plan follows Ethereum researcher Justin Drake's "bunker mode" warning that AI could find a shortcut through wallet cryptography "in months, not years" in a worst case; ZEC fell about 11% on the week after the post went viral, ending Thursday near $1,185.
• Zakura also developed a private information retrieval lookup tool so wallets can check balances without revealing which addresses belong together; an experimental version is available in the Vizor wallet.