TL;DR: Zakura has proposed assigning a separate viewing key to each Zcash swap made through NEAR Intents, reducing how much transaction history a future attacker might be able to link.
Zcash’s privacy model is built around shielding transaction details, but cross-chain swaps introduce awkward points where information can become public. A new proposal from Zcash software developer Zakura focuses on one of those points: the refund addresses involved when shielded ZEC moves through NEAR Intents.
A publicly visible address can be linked to a wallet’s viewing-key structure. If future cryptographic advances allowed an attacker to recover or exploit that relationship, exposing one address could reveal more of a user’s transaction history than intended.
Zakura’s proposed answer is to give each swap its own viewing key while leaving spending authority under the user’s control. A compromised viewing key would then reveal information related to one swap, rather than opening a window onto an entire wallet’s past.
The design also contemplates private information retrieval, allowing software to locate relevant refunds without broadcasting which addresses a user is checking.
This isn’t a response to a demonstrated quantum attack against Zcash. It is preventative engineering based on a possible future risk. The proposal remains under review, and supporters have not yet delivered a widely deployed solution.
That distinction matters. Good privacy work often means fixing linkability problems before they become exploitable, but protection must still be implemented, audited and adopted by wallets before it benefits ordinary users.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: Zakura has proposed assigning a separate viewing key to each Zcash swap made through NEAR Intents, reducing how much transaction history a future attacker might be able to link.
Zcash’s privacy model is built around shielding transaction details, but cross-chain swaps introduce awkward points where information can become public. A new proposal from Zcash software developer Zakura focuses on one of those points: the refund addresses involved when shielded ZEC moves through NEAR Intents.
A publicly visible address can be linked to a wallet’s viewing-key structure. If future cryptographic advances allowed an attacker to recover or exploit that relationship, exposing one address could reveal more of a user’s transaction history than intended.
Zakura’s proposed answer is to give each swap its own viewing key while leaving spending authority under the user’s control. A compromised viewing key would then reveal information related to one swap, rather than opening a window onto an entire wallet’s past.
The design also contemplates private information retrieval, allowing software to locate relevant refunds without broadcasting which addresses a user is checking.
This isn’t a response to a demonstrated quantum attack against Zcash. It is preventative engineering based on a possible future risk. The proposal remains under review, and supporters have not yet delivered a widely deployed solution.
That distinction matters. Good privacy work often means fixing linkability problems before they become exploitable, but protection must still be implemented, audited and adopted by wallets before it benefits ordinary users.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Bitcoin Magazine
Here’s How Not To Screw up Your Bitcoin Privacy
Just one transaction can compromise years of discreet Bitcoin activity, Cake Wallet’s chief operating officer has warned.
Speaking on the Bitcoin Rails podcast this week, activist Seth for Privacy talked about different ways of protecting one’s privacy when using Bitcoin and said that focusing on privacy was a must for the West.
Bitcoin privacy is a hot topic again ever since the developers of private coin mixer Samourai Wallet went on trial last year and were subsequently imprisoned.
But just this week, the U.S. Department of Treasury scrapped two long-stalled crypto surveillance proposals, handing a major win to privacy advocates and the digital asset industry.
“If you ever spend your no-KYC coins with one of your KYC coins — which if you just let the wallet do its thing, it could do because it doesn’t know the difference — you immediately connect all of the non-KYC Bitcoin that you spend in that with your identity,” Seth said, referring to UTXO management, also called “coin control” by some wallets.
Bitcoin wallets don’t hold a single balance but a collection of separate unspent transaction outputs — UTXOs — each one a discrete “coin” from a specific past transaction.
When you send a payment larger than any one UTXO, the wallet picks several and combines them as inputs to the same transaction — an easy mistake to make, Seth highlighted.
Seth added that unlike in the global South, where people have experienced more oppressive states, citizens in the West will need to “feel pain” in order to realize how important privacy is.
Still, he added that attitudes were changing and people were getting more serious about protecting their privacy.
“It has been shifting, in the last five or six years a lot of people — even in the West — are starting to think [privacy] really matters, we really need to think about this seriously now,” he said.
Cake Wallet is a privacy-oriented, self-custody, open-source wallet. The wallet earlier this year integrated Bitcoin’s Lightning Network into its platform.
Using the second layer solution is not only faster and cheaper, it also offers more privacy than Bitcoin’s main chain.
While Cake Wallet supports other cryptocurrencies, including privacy coin Monero, Seth for Privacy added that he’d love it if the digital coin didn’t exist.
“If Bitcoin’s privacy got good enough that you could use it and have at least almost as good privacy as Monero without massive hoops to jump through, and Monero ceased to exist, that’s fine,” he said.
“I would much rather the thing that more people use has better privacy than a more niche tool that has perfect privacy, and that’s something that less people are using because it’s less well known.”
This post Here’s How Not To Screw up Your Bitcoin Privacy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
TL;DR: NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs, funding the company’s entire seed round. Soda is building privacy infrastructure based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation so financial applications can process confidential data while remaining connected to public blockchains.
Public blockchains are very good at proving what happened.
That is also one of the reasons banks struggle to use them.
Soda Labs has raised $3 million to tackle the problem from the opposite direction: keep the public blockchain, but make sensitive computation private.
Luxembourg-based venture firm NextBlock funded the company’s entire seed round.
Soda has spent roughly two and a half years developing a cryptographic system based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation, often shortened to GC-MPC.
The idea is to let applications perform calculations on private data without exposing the underlying information to everyone watching the chain.
For financial institutions, that could apply to transaction details, balances, business logic or other data that cannot simply be made public.
Privacy is one of the central contradictions in institutional blockchain adoption.
Banks like the idea of shared settlement infrastructure and programmable assets.
They generally do not like the idea of broadcasting client activity, positions and commercial information to the world.
One solution is to build private or permissioned blockchains.
Soda is betting that institutions would rather keep access to public networks and add confidentiality at the computation layer.
Its technology uses established cryptographic components including AES and SHA-256 and is designed to run on ordinary cloud CPUs rather than requiring specialized hardware.
That could matter for adoption.
Privacy systems are much harder to deploy if every user needs unusual infrastructure or if computation becomes prohibitively expensive.
Soda says its architecture is designed for financial applications that need to remain interoperable with existing public blockchain ecosystems.
The $3 million round is small by the standards of the biggest crypto infrastructure raises, but the problem Soda is working on has become more valuable as tokenization expands.
A tokenized bond or fund can exist on a public chain while still carrying confidential information around counterparties, trading and ownership.
Institutions need ways to prove rules were followed without publishing every piece of data involved.
That is why privacy technology is reappearing in a different form from the anonymous-transaction narrative that dominated earlier crypto cycles.
The demand is increasingly about selective confidentiality.
Regulators, auditors or authorized parties may need access to information while the wider public does not.
Soda’s challenge is proving that its cryptographic approach can deliver that privacy without making applications too slow or complex to use.
NextBlock is betting $3 million that it can.
If public blockchains are going to host more conventional finance, the networks may need to learn an unusual skill.
They need to remain verifiable without making everything visible.
Bitcoin Magazine
Bitcoin Privacy Legend Amir Taaki Deported From Singapore
Crypto-anarchist, former Bitcoin Core contributor and cypherpunk legend Amir Taaki is in trouble again.
Writing on X Tuesday, the developer said that he was questioned by Singaporean police before being deported from the country about “what I work on.”
British-Iranian programmer Taaki, who was one of the first Bitcoin contributors, claims he has been in trouble with certain countries since spending time fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units in Syria years ago.
Just got questioned for 6 hours by glow police then deported from Singapore. Everything about what I work on.
— Amir Taaki ⛛ (@lunardragon420) October 6, 2026
The extralegal glow regime charge my friends with fake things like money laundering. But they have nothing on me so they strike from the shadow. Weak coward tactics.… pic.twitter.com/l3SPA7lwWR
Taaki, who has made significant contributions to bitcoin privacy over the years, today is working on a crypto privacy protocol called DarkFi.
“The extralegal glow regime charge my friends with fake things like money laundering,” wrote Taaki.
“But they have nothing on me so they strike from the shadow. Weak coward tactics. Face me bitch.”
Taaki added that in the past year alone, he has also been deported from Argentina and Mexico, and detained in Serbia and Japan.
He continued: “Every time it happens I ask why and they always tell me it’s just a random check,” adding that authorities never give reasons for why he is being detained or questioned.
“I am on a list but I am not able to find any info about which country has sanctioned me.”
Taaki, who has contributed to Bitcoin Magazine, first faced trouble with British authorities after going to Syria to fight against the Islamic State group back in 2016.
He said in a 2017 BBC interview that he spent three and half months fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units before helping with community projects in the country.
Privacy-focused Taaki, wrote the first implementations of CoinJoin and stealth addresses, created libbitcoin, and founded the UK’s first Bitcoin exchange.
He also authored BIP 0001, which set up the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process.
This post Bitcoin Privacy Legend Amir Taaki Deported From Singapore first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
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