- Zakura expects post-quantum signature opcodes to land in ZCash in January, enabling hash-based signatures for transparent payments.
- The approach combines address rotation with private information retrieval, a feature rolling out this week in the Vizor wallet, to prevent servers from linking user addresses.
- The plan follows Justin Drake’s “bunker mode” warning, covers only transparent payments, and has no confirmed network activation date.
While the crypto industry debates “bunker mode,” Zakura, the team behind a Zcash full node, says it already has a plan. According to an engineering post by Roman Akhtariev, the goal is “full post-quantum safe transparent pools with hash based signatures.”
Opcodes are low-level instructions that would allow the network to verify a new type of signature. Zcash supports shielded payments, which hide sender, recipient, and amount, and transparent payments, which are publicly visible like Bitcoin.
Zakura’s approach pairs address rotation with a hash-based backup signature known as WOTS. Hash-based schemes avoid the elliptic-curve math that researchers fear AI or quantum computers could crack.
Rotation creates a privacy problem, however: when a wallet asks a server to check balances across many addresses, the server can link them. Zakura says it solves this with private information retrieval (PIR), letting wallets fetch records without revealing which ones they request. The feature is rolling out this week in the Vizor wallet, where users can toggle “private queries” in settings.
“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. 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 said he believed it was “plausible” that AI-driven advancements in math could break encryption within the next two years.
The plan covers only Zcash’s transparent side, and the post didn’t specify how or when the opcodes would be activated across the network. The announcement comes as Zcash draws institutional interest, including a proposed U.S. ETF tied to the Winklevoss twins and Europe‘s first Zcash ETP, following an upgrade designed to make private payments three times faster.
✅ Follow BITNEWSBOT on Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com, and Google News for instant updates.
