The team behind Zakura, a newer version of the software that runs the Zcash network, wants to give every ZEC swap made through NEAR Intents its own private key.

The change would close a gap that a future quantum computer could use to piece together a user’s payment history, according to a new engineering post from the team.

NEAR Intents is a service that lets users swap tokens across different blockchains. When someone swaps private ZEC for USDC through it, the service posts one of their private Zcash addresses on NEAR’s public chain, so it knows where to send back any unused ZEC. That address goes up as soon as the deposit lands and stays there even if the swap goes through and no refund is ever needed.

Such addresses give away no information on today’s computers. Each Zcash address carries a public key built from the wallet’s viewing key, the secret a wallet uses to spot payments sent to it, using one-way elliptic-curve math similar to what protects bitcoin and ether wallets.

Ordinary computers can’t run that math in reverse, but a large enough quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm, a method published in 1994 for exactly that job, could theroretically work backward from the address to the key.

That’s the real threat hanging over Satoshi-era bitcoin , whose public keys already sit onchain for anyone to copy. Last week, Google said its Willow quantum chip had produced near-perfect versions of one of the components such an attack would burn through, a step toward a machine powerful enough to try it.

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