Zakura Targets January for Quantum-Resistant Zcash Payments

Zakura plans to add post-quantum signature opcodes to Zcash’s transparent payment pool in January, while separately testing a privacy system designed to hide wallet queries from remote servers.

Zcash (ZEC) transparent payments expose addresses and transaction amounts on the blockchain. A transparent address initially contains a hash of a public key, but spending from it reveals the public key alongside the transaction signature.

The proposed upgrade would support hash-based signatures, including WOTS-style signatures, as a fallback to the elliptic-curve signatures used today. The goal is to reduce the risk that future advances in quantum computing or cryptographic research could help attackers forge approvals from exposed public keys.

Zakura, a Zcash full-node project, also proposes rotating transparent addresses after each transaction. Remaining funds would move behind a different public-key hash, limiting the value associated with any key that has already been exposed.

That approach creates a separate wallet-privacy challenge. Wallets routinely query remote procedure call servers for balances and transaction history, and those servers can potentially identify groups of addresses being checked together.

Zakura’s proposed private information retrieval, or PIR, system is intended to let wallets request records without revealing which addresses they selected. Transactions would remain publicly visible; the system would protect wallet queries rather than conceal on-chain activity.

An experimental “Private queries” setting is available for testing in the Vizor wallet. No January timeline has been set for PIR.

“Our team plans for post-quantum signature opcodes to land in Zcash in January,” Roman Akhtariev wrote.

The January target is a development goal, not a confirmed mainnet activation date. It applies to transparent payments and does not establish an equivalent upgrade schedule for Zcash’s shielded pools, which use different cryptographic mechanisms.

A separate proposal, ZIP 2005, is designed to support a future transition and recovery of certain Ironwood-pool funds during a cryptographic emergency. It does not itself make Zcash quantum-secure, and funds remaining in the Sprout, Sapling or Orchard pools would not be recoverable under that proposal after those protocols are disabled.

The planned work adds wallet-query privacy to Zakura’s earlier January target for quantum-resistant Zcash payments, but the two efforts have different timelines and scopes.