Zcash will roll out quantum reusable wallets within a month and reach full post-quantum status within 12 to 18 months, Zcash Open Development Lab founder and CEO Josh Swihart told a Consensus Miami audience Thursday in a session moderated by Solana infra firm Helius founder Mert Mumtaz.
A separate scaling track targets MasterCard and Visa scale throughput on a similar horizon.
The roadmap arrived amid a ZEC rally that has lifted the token more than 110% over the past 30 days, as prominent crypto fund Multicoin Capital unveiled a significant ZEC investment and the privacy narrative that caught investors off guard, sentiment data shows.
Swihart’s pitch was that Bitcoin no longer holds up as the cypherpunk-quality money it was meant to be. The asset works as an ETF wrapper and a store of value, he said, but as a peer-to-peer private payment system “it’s just fundamentally broken.”
Visible balances on a transparent ledger let governments seize what they can see, he argued, the same criticism of wealth visibility that Multicoin’s Tushar Jain leaned on this week when he revealed the fund’s purchase.
User-side traction runs through Electric Coin Company’s mobile wallet after an October integration with Near Intent opened cross-chain swaps from assets like BTC, SOL and USDC directly into shielded ZEC.
Near Intents let a user specify what they want, like converting USDC to ZEC, while specialized routers handle the multi-step trade across different blockchains in the background.
About $600 million to $700 million has flowed through that route since launch, mostly to and from USD and USDC, Swihart said. Near’s broader intent-based system has processed close to $800 million in volume over the past 30 days alone, per Near Protocol data, 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, where bridges to Solana and Hyperliquid are already live, Mumtaz noted.
Token-holder voting through Zashi is also planned, Swihart said, less as formal governance and more as a layer of opinion that feeds the project’s existing rough consensus model.
For traders, the purest test in the near term is whether quantum recovery actually ships within Swihart’s stated month. The fail-safe is the foreclosed pool, which now sits at about 30% of circulating ZEC, an all-time high. If it continues to grow along with the price, the rally will be underwritten by adoption rather than speculation
