Zcash development team plans to introduce quantum-resistant signature mechanism in January next year, with about 70% of ZEC still in transparent address pool.

BlockBeats news, October 9 — The development team behind privacy-focused public blockchain Zcash plans to introduce quantum-resistant signature-related opcodes to the network in January 2027, enabling transaction verification through hash-based signatures to mitigate the threat that future breakthroughs in quantum computing could pose to wallet key security. However, a formal activation date for the feature has not yet been determined.

Zakura engineer Roman Akhtariev said the team plans to incorporate post-quantum signature opcodes into Zcash next January. The mechanism is designed to prevent attackers from deriving private keys from public keys and forging transaction authorizations.

The upgrade focuses on Zcash's transparent transaction system. Data shows that as of Thursday, about 11.96 million ZEC were held in the transparent address pool, accounting for roughly 70% of the 16.98 million ZEC in circulation. Transparent transactions publicly disclose addresses and transaction amounts, while shielded transactions are able to hide information such as the sender, recipient and amount.

In addition, Zakura has launched a wallet balance query tool based on private information retrieval (PIR), allowing users to query address balances while avoiding exposing the list of queried addresses to servers. An experimental version of the tool is already available through the "Private queries" setting in the Zcash wallet Vizor.

Previously, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that AI-assisted attacks could accelerate the risk of cracking existing cryptographic systems, and advised coin holders to prepare for "Bunker Mode" in extreme scenarios. However, no practical quantum attack against the keys of related mainstream crypto wallets has been confirmed so far.