Zcash Developer Proposes Per-Swap Keys To Limit Future Quantum Privacy Risk

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR: Zakura has proposed assigning a separate viewing key to each Zcash swap made through NEAR Intents, reducing how much transaction history a future attacker might be able to link. Zcash’s privacy model is built around shielding transaction details, but cross-chain swaps introduce awkward points where information can become public. A new proposal from Zcash software developer Zakura focuses on one of those points: the refund addresses involved when shielded ZEC moves through NEAR Intents. A publicly visible address can be linked to a wallet’s viewing-key structure. If future cryptographic advances allowed an attacker to recover or exploit that relationship, exposing one address could reveal more of a user’s transaction history than intended. Zakura’s proposed answer is to give each swap its own viewing key while leaving spending authority under the user’s control. A compromised viewing key would then reveal information related to one swap, rather than opening a window onto an entire wallet’s past. The design also contemplates private information retrieval, allowing software to lo...