The Zcash development team plans to assign a unique viewing key for each ZEC cross-chain swap to mitigate future quantum computing risks.
According to CoinDesk, the development team behind Zcash's new node software, Zakura, plans to generate a unique viewing key for each ZEC swap conducted via NEAR Intents, while the spending key remains secured by the user's primary account. Under the current architecture, when users swap private ZEC for USDC via NEAR Intents, one of their Zcash privacy addresses is publicly broadcast on the NEAR public chain as a refund address and remains retained after the swap is completed. While this address currently does not leak information, sufficiently powerful quantum computers in the future could potentially reverse-engineer the viewing key using Shor's algorithm, thereby linking all payments received by that account, including amounts and memos. By implementing a "one-key-per-swap" approach, even if a refund address is compromised, attackers will only be able to view payments related to that specific swap. To address the issue of having to scan the entire blockchain sequentially during wallet recovery due to an abundance of keys, Zakura employs Private Information Retrieval (PIR) technology, allowing the wallet to query the location of incoming refunds without the database learning which address was queried.