Zcash will launch quantum recoverable wallets within a month and reach full post-quantum state within 12 to 18 months, Zcash Open Development Lab founder and CEO Josh Swihart told a Consensus Miami audience on Thursday in a session moderated by infrastructure firm Solana Helius founder Mert Mumtaz.
A separate scale path points to the performance at scale of MasterCard and Visa over a similar horizon.
The roadmap came during a ZEC rally that has lifted the token over 110% in the past 30 days as prominent crypto fund Multicoin Capital revealed a sizable investment in ZEC and the privacy narrative became popular among investors, sentiment data shows.
Swihart’s argument was that Bitcoin no longer holds up as the cypherpunk-grade money it was meant to be. The asset functions as an ETF wrapper and store of value, he said, but as a private peer-to-peer payment system “it is fundamentally broken.”
Visible balances on a transparent ledger allow governments to seize what they can see, he argued, the same critique of wealth visibility that Multicoin’s Tushar Jain relied on this week in revealing the fund’s purchases.
User-side traction is running through Electric Coin Company’s mobile wallet after an October integration with Near Intents opened up cross-chain swaps of assets like BTC, SOL, and USDC directly to secured ZEC.
Nearby Intents allow the user to indicate what they want, such as converting USDC to ZEC, while specialized routers handle multi-step trading across different blockchains in the background.
About $600 million to $700 million has flowed through that route since its launch, primarily to and from USD and USDC, Swihart said. Near’s broader intent-based system has processed nearly $800 million in volume in the last 30 days alone, according to data from Near Protocol, with Ethereum, Solana, and Zcash dominating the chain side.
A separate proposal to reduce Zcash’s target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds is under active discussion on the project’s community forum, with bridges to Solana and Hyperliquid already active, Mumtaz noted.
Voting by token holders through Zashi is also scheduled, Swihart said, less as formal governance and more as a layer of opinion that feeds into the project’s existing rough consensus model.
For traders, the clearest near-term test is whether quantum recoverability actually delivers within the month indicated by Swihart. The fail-safe solution is the protected pool, which now sits at approximately 30% of the circulating ZEC, an all-time high. If it continues to grow along with the price, the rally will be supported by adoption and not speculation.
