This was announced by the founder and CEO of Zcash Open Development Lab Josh Suihart at the Consensus conference, writes CoinDesk.
According to him, the full transition of the network to post-quantum standards will take 12-18 months. Separately, the project is working on scaling up to Mastercard and Visa-level throughput in a comparable time frame.
Suihart said Zcash wants to take the industry back to the original idea of private peer-to-peer payments. He noted that bitcoin works well as a savings and ETF tool, but is “fundamentally broken” as a confidential settlement system because of its fully transparent registry.
Open balances allow states and other participants to track users’ assets and potentially apply seizure or pressure mechanisms, the expert emphasized.
Zcash rally
Over the past week, the price of ZEC has risen by more than 60%. On May 6, the asset’s exchange rate exceeded $585 for the first time since November 2025.
At the time of writing, the coin is trading around $571 (-0.1% per day).
One of the drivers was a statement by Multicoin Capital co-founder Tushar Jain: the fund has built up a “significant position” in Zcash since February.
An additional factor remains the growth of ZEC’s protected supply. Now about 30% of coins in circulation are in the private pool – a historical maximum for the network.
According to Suihart, user demand is coming through the Zodl (formerly Zashi) mobile wallet. In October, it integrated the intent system from the NEAR protocol. This allowed bitcoin, Solana, USDC and other assets to be exchanged directly into the secure ZEC.
Since launch, about $700 million has passed through this route – mostly between USD, USDC and ZEC.
