You are reading the second article on Zeboot 2026. If you haven’t check the first one here

Day 2 Cypherpunks building for the normies

The second day would feature many topics like NEAR, NYM, Quantum resistance, ecosystem collaboration and governance. Everything started with a strong message:

*“The tool that Satoshi built to free us became the panopticon. Everyone wants to opt-in to get rich. There is no other group in the world that wants to fix this except the people in this group. We are cypherpunks building for the normies.”*

NEAR

One person from this protocol presented to the room the current state of NEAR intents and its next steps for Zcash.

NEAR protocol provides very fast execution to transactions with low fees, more than 25 blockchains supported, +14 million swaps with 99.9% success rate. One distinction with most of its competitors is that there are no contract calls. Users perform transfers and are always in control of this risk exposure. This allows the user to store assets in the protocol and perform fast swaps on demand. It also provides gas abstractions which is a huge win in terms of UX. Although it integrates AML and KYC tools, NEAR never freezes users’ assets. These checks are performed when the price quote for the intent is requested so there’s no in-flight check and warning screens. To the day of this talk the NEAR representative informed the room that they have never been in the situation to have received any warnings from their checks.

I’ve read many analyses of “the Zcash comeback” NEAR intents and Zashi’s UX are common denominators of most of them.

What’s next for NEAR and Zcash?

A few things were presented: Escrow Swaps, 1-click earn and private intents.

Escrow swaps will mostly be transparent to users, but will provide solvers a better way to perform market making, lower fees and make trades that take more time to be fulfilled with lower risks associated with volatility. This will allow NEAR Intents to have limit, take profit or DCA orders and streaming swaps (partitioning a large trade in several smaller ones).

Next NEAR folks presented 1-click-earn which will be a mechanism to use financial instruments like staking, Liquidity providing, capital allocation to vaults or even more complicated strategies just with one click. Which is something really useful for wallet integrations. It will be awesome to have these things available in Zcash wallets!

The last thing they presented is “Private Intents” which are trades with superior privacy guarantees compared with what the usual trades on transparent chains are. This is no competition for Zcash but they assume it will help users from other chains have privacy awareness.

How will Zcash benefit from these innovations?

The NEAR intents team thesis is that Zcash will benefit by

• Being able to transition to multi-asset wallets easily
• Integrate 1-click earn trading strategies
• 1-click earn ZEC yield
• Being able to perform advanced trading orders in within a DEX
• Use private intents on transparent chains

Post-quantum Zcash

Before letting you know about this session, I’ll add a small introduction to the topic.

Quantum Computers are evolving quickly. The cost of advancing this technology is really high. But the prize is very juicy as well. Not so much for the potential “unauthorized” spend of Satoshi Coins or stealing big wallets. The real goal is being able to decrypt adversaries’ communications. Thanks to the evolution of high density storage governments have the capacity of storing information from the past 10 years. Moreso, with surveillance legalized by laws like the Patriot Act, governments can force Telecommunications companies to store information for years to come. Even though those communications are end-to-end encrypted, the end goal is to store now and decrypt later when that encryption can be broken either by a vulnerability or a quantum computer whatever comes first. Quantum computers put DeFi at risk because the moment an attack is proven feasible if things are not in a good place to be quantum proof, the whole industry can fall as a house of cards blown by the breeze of a quantum algorithm.

That being said, let’s continue with Zeboot 2026.

This is the part where things got really technical but in essence the question is: When will we have Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computers (CRQCs)?

Estimations say that by 2032 there will be public demos and 2029 could be the time where privately funded attacks could be performed. Although the real objective can be to undermine the confidence in pre-quantum cryptography. Waiting and seeing is not the right approach here and cryptographers are warning us that we can’t wait because tomorrow it will be too late. We need to start working on post-quantum protocol design now.

Attackers can harvest the data from the blockchain now and decrypt later when they have a CRQC. So the point is to strengthen our protocol design and start moving towards Quantum-proof cryptography

Zcash’s privacy is quantum resilient. Only CRQCs that have an address have better odds to decrypt a shielded note. So you can protect yourself by not sharing your addresses publicly in social media, or at least not the ones you care about a lot.

The size of addresses is a problem in post quantum crypto. They simply don’t fit a QR code. You will need an animated QR in order to transmit them to a sender. Stores won’t be able to print their addresses and stick them on the counter. Additionally they become even more difficult to visually validate.

Currently there’s a sentiment poll around many topics and quantum recoverability is one of them. You can learn more about this in this forum thread.

Thanks for reading!