According to the source, Zcash developers are preparing for quantum risks by leveraging the protocol’s repeatable network upgrade process, demonstrated by NU5 in May 2022 which shipped Halo 2 and the Orchard shielded pool, showing the chain can change core cryptography through on-chain consensus (source: Electric Coin Company, 2022). Both BTC and ZEC currently depend on elliptic-curve cryptography that would be breakable by sufficiently large quantum computers, highlighting the need for migration paths and key-rotation tooling (source: NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography project, 2024; Bitcoin.org Developer Guide). NIST has standardized post-quantum signature families ML-DSA (CRYSTALS-Dilithium) and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+), which are candidates for future blockchain integrations once performance and footprint constraints are evaluated (source: NIST PQC standards, 2024). Zcash’s ZIP governance process and active engineering by Electric Coin Company and the Zcash Foundation provide a mechanism to propose and deploy such primitives, while Bitcoin’s developer community has discussed PQ options on the bitcoin-dev mailing list without any PQ signature scheme adopted on mainnet to date (sources: Zcash ZIP repository; Zcash Foundation updates; bitcoin-dev mailing list). For trading, the most actionable signals are: the appearance of ZIPs proposing PQ signatures or key-rotation, ECC/ZF engineering updates announcing testnet deployments or audits, and release timelines similar to prior Zcash upgrades that preceded mainnet activations (sources: Zcash ZIP repository; Electric Coin Company engineering updates; Zcash Foundation engineering posts).