The Zcash Daily — Friday, October 9, 2026
Zakura engineer Roman Akhtariev published a post-quantum upgrade plan targeting January 2027: hash-based spending signatures for transparent addresses, replacing the elliptic curve math that quantum computers could eventually crack. The uncomfortable number in the announcement: 70% of circulating ZEC — roughly 11.96 million coins — sits in transparent addresses right now. That’s 70% of all ZEC with public keys exposed on-chain, waiting for a defense that hasn’t shipped yet. The upgrade protects only the transparent pool; shielded addresses need separate quantum-resistant work. Ethereum’s Justin Drake has been pushing “bunker mode” — moving funds to addresses whose public keys have never been exposed. For Zcash, the answer to bunker mode is the shielded pool itself. The irony: the privacy feature is also the quantum shelter.
Zakura also shipped something quieter that matters more than it looks. Private Information Retrieval is now experimental in the Vizor wallet — when you check a balance, the server can’t see which address you’re querying. Ordinary balance lookups let the server correlate addresses that appear unrelated on-chain; PIR closes that leak. Transparent activity is split into block-range shards, each with a compact filter the wallet checks locally. The wallet only makes a private server lookup when a filter flags a match. The same method can rebuild full wallet history from a mnemonic. This is infrastructure-level privacy plumbing — the kind of work that never makes headlines but changes what “using Zcash” actually means.
ZEC dropped to $1,148 intraday yesterday before bouncing to ~$1,218 — a $10.88M liquidation cascade in a single hour wiped overleveraged longs. Total 24h liquidations hit $13.6M, 80% of it long positions. The correction from September’s $1,697 peak is now 30%. The October 20 mainnet decision is 11 days out.
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