Developers working on Zcash are preparing a change that would give every swap routed through NEAR Intents its own unique key. The fix is aimed at keeping ZEC trades private from future quantum computers, according to the team behind Zakura, the project leading the effort.
The concern is straightforward: a refund address left on NEAR's public chain could be linked back to a user's broader payment history. By generating a fresh key for each swap, the team wants to break that link before quantum machines become powerful enough to exploit it.
Why a public refund address is a privacy leak
NEAR Intents lets users swap assets across chains, but the mechanics leave a trace. When a swap is initiated, a refund address is recorded on NEAR's public ledger so that funds can be returned if the transaction fails. That address, if reused or tied to other activity, becomes a thread that connects separate trades.
For Zcash users, who rely on shielded transactions to keep their financial lives out of public view, that thread is a problem. It doesn't matter how private the ZEC side of the swap is if the NEAR side hands over a map. The Zakura team's answer is to stop the mapping at the source: one key per swap, used once and never again.
What the per-swap key change actually does
Under the plan, every swap through NEAR Intents would receive its own unique key rather than sharing a key or address across multiple transactions. The refund address would still exist on NEAR's chain, but it wouldn't be reusable in a way that exposes a user's wider payment history.
The team hasn't said when the change will ship or which codebases will need to be updated. What's clear is that the fix is designed to be invisible to users—they won't have to manage keys manually or change how they initiate swaps. The privacy gain comes from the plumbing, not from user behavior.
The quantum clock behind the decision
Quantum computing is the long game here. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in theory, derive private keys from public ones, which would unravel much of the cryptography that protects blockchain transactions today. That day isn't here, but the data being recorded on public chains now will still be there when it arrives.
That's why the Zakura team is framing the per-swap key approach as a preemptive measure. A refund address that seems harmless today could become a liability if a future quantum machine can trace it back to a user's history. By making each swap key unique, the team is trying to ensure that even a future adversary with quantum tools can't stitch together a single user's trades from NEAR's public records.
What's still unresolved
The plan is short on specifics. There's no timeline, no technical specification, and no word on whether other Zcash developers or NEAR's own team have signed off on the approach. The Zakura team is behind the effort, but Zcash is a decentralized project, and changes to how swaps are handled would need buy-in from the broader community.
For now, the per-swap key idea is a proposal in motion. The next concrete step would be a testnet deployment or a formal proposal to Zcash's governance process. Until then, ZEC holders who use NEAR Intents are left with the current setup: private on one side, public on the other, and a refund address that sits in between.
