ZEC Price Surges as Zcash Developers Set January Target for Quantum-Resistant Payments

Zcash developers target January to add support for quantum-resistant payments, initially focusing on public addresses holding roughly 70% of ZEC. Traders responded immediately, causing ZEC price to extend the 24-hour rebound to more than 11%.

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Developers Target Making Zcash Payments Quantum-Resistant

Zakura, a full-node implementation for the Zcash network, revealed that the team plans to add post-quantum signature opcodes to Zcash in January. However, the network activation timeline has not yet been finalized.

Those opcodes introduce hash-based signatures to protect wallets from future quantum attacks that could expose private keys and enable theft. The goal is to stop an attacker from taking a public key already visible on-chain and working backward to forge a wallet owner’s approval and spend the coins.

The proposal primarily targets transparent payments to mitigate the risk of transaction signature forgery in the event of future quantum computing breakthroughs that compromise existing public-key cryptography systems.

Currently, approximately 11.96 million ZEC are held in the transparent pool, accounting for about 70% of the total issued ZEC.

Zakura is also advancing a privacy-preserving balance query tool that reduces the exposure of address linkage information to servers when querying multiple addresses; post-quantum protection for the privacy pool, however, will require separate development.

This follows a warning from researcher Justin Drake urging the industry to prepare a “bunker mode” against future quantum threats and AI-assisted attacks on wallet security. Vitalik Buterin explained how AI could weaken quantum-resistant crypto signatures in 2 Years.

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ZEC Price Skyrockets Over 11%

ZEC price has jumped 11% in the past 24 hours, with the price currently trading at 1,224.57. The 24-hour low and high are $1,114.07 and $1,245.56, respectively. Furthermore, trading volume has increased by a massive 80% in the last 24 hours, indicating a rise in interest among traders.

Meanwhile, Zcash shielded transactions hit a four-year high. 62,379 transactions were sent last week, the highest weekly total since 2022. Moreover, Grayscale Zcash ETF launch drew close to $1 billion in assets within about a month as the token rallied sharply. Grayscale Research predicted that ZEC price can rally to $8100 by 2030.

CoinGlass data showed mixed sentiment in the derivatives market. The total ZEC futures open interest jumped more than 1% to $2.60 billion in the last 24 hours.

The 4-hour Zcash futures open interest on Binance and OKX fell., climbed more than 15% and 5%, respectively. This signals bullish sentiment among derivatives traders.

Check the 10 best Zcash (ZEC) exchanges in 2026, along with details on trading pairs, shielded support, fees, security, availability, and track record.