NewsTechnologyHow Zcash Plans to Hide Your Keys From AI and Quantum AttacksZakura, a Zcash full node developer, says it expects hash-based signatures to land in Zcash in January, and is rolling out a privacy tool for rotating transparent addresses this week.By Decrypt StaffEdited by Guillermo JimenezOct 11, 2026Oct 11, 20263 min readZcash. Image: ShutterstockCreate an account to save your articles.Add on GoogleAdd Decrypt as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.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
Here's our plan for quantum-safe, unlinkable, rotating taddrs. Possible with Zcash, today
While others are worrying about the viability of rotating transparent addresses, we're already solving linkability
Zakura’s approach combines two defenses. Wallets would rotate to a fresh address after every transaction, keeping public keys out of view, and add a hash-based backup signature known as WOTS. Hash-based schemes avoid the elliptic-curve math that researchers fear AI or quantum computers could eventually crack
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“While others are worrying about the viability of rotating transparent addresses, we’re already solving linkability,” Zakura wrote on X
That’s a nod to Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, who this week urged holders to calmly move funds to fresh addresses. The public response to Drake’s call to action, however, was not so calm
Drake warned that AI-driven math could break the ECDSA signatures securing Bitcoin and Ethereum before quantum computers do, “in the worst case in months not years.” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has since weighed in on the debate and said he believed it was “plausible” that AI-driven advancements in math could break encryption within the next two years
The push comes as Zcash draws growing institutional interest, including another proposed U.S. ETF tied to the Winklevoss twins and Europe’s first Zcash ETP. It also follows an upgrade designed to make private payments three times faster
