Original article | Odaily Odaily( @OdailyChina )
Author | Dingdang ( @XiaMiPP )
Amidst the dramatic market fluctuations and the rapid creation and abandonment of Chinese memes, if there is any narrative worth our continued attention, privacy is certainly one of them.
From Zcash's surge in 2025 to Monero breaking an eight-year high in 2026, the performance of privacy-related assets is no longer just a temporary emotional rebound, but has been reintroduced into the long-term issue of crypto infrastructure.
In its latest article, "Privacy Trends for 2026," published at the beginning of the year, a16z re-examined the role of privacy in the next stage of encryption technology evolution from multiple perspectives, including decentralized communication, data access control, and security engineering methodologies (recommended reading: " Zcash is just the beginning; how does a16z redefine the privacy narrative for 2026? ").
Against this backdrop, privacy is no longer merely a tool to "fight regulation," but rather a fundamental infrastructure capability supporting the sustainable operation of encrypted systems. This issue of Odaily Odaily systematically reviews several privacy-related assets; let's take a look at which projects are truly gaining market favor recently.
Monero (#15): The Return of Privacy Fundamentals After 8 Years
On January 13th, the price of Monero (XMR) broke through $650. This round of gains, which began at the start of 2024, represents an increase of over 500% . However, more symbolic than the price increase itself is that this marks the first time in eight years that XMR has effectively broken through the historical high of the 2017 bull market cycle.
In the world of cryptocurrency, Monero is perhaps one of the most thorough and tenacious in terms of privacy . Since its inception in 2014, it has consistently adhered to the core design principles of "default privacy, mandatory privacy, and untraceability."
In its implementation, Monero systematically smooths out on-chain analyzability through multi-layered cryptographic mechanisms. Ring signatures are used to hide the identity of the transaction sender: the real input is mixed with multiple historical "bait" outputs on the blockchain to form a "ring," and external observers can only determine that "someone in the ring is spending funds," but cannot determine who it is. Stealth addresses automatically generate a one-time receiving address for each transaction, and only the recipient can identify the income by viewing the key, thereby severing the permanent association between the recipient and the public address. Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) further hide the transaction amount. With the help of range proof technologies such as Pedersen commitments and Bulletproofs++, while ensuring that the amount is invisible, the network can still verify that there is no creation of coins or double-spending.
With these mechanisms combined, the sender, receiver, and amount of all transactions are hidden by default, and there are no traceable transparent records on the entire chain, thus providing extremely high anonymity and currency interchangeability, far exceeding currencies with optional privacy.
However, as the saying goes, "possessing a treasure invites trouble," this extreme design also made Monero one of the most unfriendly entities from a regulatory perspective. Under continuous compliance pressure, by 2024, major exchanges such as Binance and OKX had successively delisted all spot trading pairs of XMR, retaining only contract trading.
Zcash (#28): A Dramatic Governance Shakeup
Zcash is the biggest contributor to this privacy coin resurgence. Related reading: " The Revival of Privacy Coins: From Binance Delisting Candidate to a 13-Fold Surge, ZEC's Lightning Rebirth ".
However, on January 8th, Josh Swihart, CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the Zcash (ZEC) development team, stated that most members of the Bootstrap board (the non-profit organization behind ECC, which supports Zcash through the management of ECC), particularly Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai (collectively known as the ZCAM group), had clearly deviated from Zcash's mission. Following ZCAM's presumed dismissal decision, the entire ECC team chose to resign collectively. It should be noted that since 2020, after a majority of shareholders chose to donate their shares, ECC has been gradually transitioning to a non-profit structure, with Bootstrap assuming governance functions. After the news was announced, ZEC briefly fell below $362, a drop of over 40%.
Bootstrap subsequently issued a clarification statement, stating that the dispute stemmed from legal restrictions encountered when seeking external investment. They have already begun discussions on "alternative structures for external investment and the privatization of Zashi" and are working with legal counsel to ensure that all paths comply with U.S. nonprofit laws, while not deviating from Zcash's long-term mission or harming the interests of the broader community.
However, this statement did not immediately reverse market sentiment.
However, the Zcash Foundation also stated that Zcash is always a decentralized open-source protocol, and no single contributor, team, or organization can control Zcash.
From its inception, Zcash has made "resilience" one of its core objectives. Its codebase is completely open source, its consensus rules are maintained by independent nodes worldwide, and its ecosystem development is supported by diverse organizations and contributors. As the protocol's guardian, the Zcash Foundation's mission includes: maintaining protocol security, funding independent research and engineering practices, promoting decentralized governance, and advocating for privacy as a fundamental human right.
Humanity (#215): Not creating a privacy coin, but reconstructing "privacy identity"
Unlike the aforementioned projects, Humanity Protocol (H) does not focus on "financial privacy," but rather attempts to reconstruct the balance between privacy and trust at the level of digital identity .
Humanity uses palmprint biometrics combined with zero-knowledge proofs to verify users' authenticity without disclosing any personal data, aiming to build a decentralized trust layer protected against Sybil attacks. The project launched in 2023 and listed its token H in June 2025.
At the application level, Humanity has announced a partnership with Mastercard to combine its Open Finance Connectivity with the Human ID identity system, enabling users to access real-world financial services such as credit and loans without compromising their privacy.
In July 2025, Nasdaq-listed Prenetics announced the inclusion of H tokens in its cryptocurrency vault. The company had previously purchased 187 BTC for $20 million, making it one of the first healthcare companies to add Bitcoin to its vault. Perhaps due to this, coupled with the financial move, the price of H tokens surged from $0.026 to $0.4, a maximum increase of 14 times, before falling back and undergoing a period of significant trading, currently hovering around $0.17.
Compared to other privacy projects, Humanity is still in a more early stage. However, its focus on "privacy identity" clearly offers another way to approach the privacy narrative.
Railgun (#331): The "Private Wallet Layer" in DeFi
Railgun is a decentralized privacy protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs that runs on Ethereum and multiple EVM-compatible chains. Its core goal is not simply to make transfers anonymous, but to provide DeFi users with composable privacy interaction capabilities.
Unlike mixers like Tornado Cash, Railgun is more like a "private wallet layer." Users can directly build private balances within the protocol and then interact discreetly with any EVM smart contract. The entire process is non-custodial, open-source, and requires no trust in a third party. It allows users to completely hide their wallet address, transaction amount, and strategy details when performing operations such as trading, lending, providing liquidity, or mining, without sacrificing the decentralized nature of DeFi.
Launched in 2021, Railgun introduced a " proof of innocence " mechanism in 2024 after Tornado Cash was sanctioned to reduce the risk of being wrongly identified as an illegal tool, while gradually expanding to Layer 2 to reduce the cost of use.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was one of the early supporters of Railgun and made multiple donations through the protocol to avoid on-chain tracking.
Dune data shows that Railgun's fund usage has remained active since 2022, with a significant increase in activity, especially after Ethereum gas costs dropped substantially in 2024. To date, the cumulative transaction volume has reached $ 4.49 billion , of which approximately $4.03 billion is worth of ETH.
Pirate Chain (#488): Treats "privacy" as the sole premise, without making any compromises.
Pirate Chain (ARRR) is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency project aiming to provide the most anonymous digital currency. Launched in 2018, it draws inspiration from Zcash's zk-SNARKs technology. However, unlike Zcash's optional privacy, Pirate Chain enforces 100% privacy , creating the world's largest organic anonymity set to prevent information leaks through online activity and support rapid verification without exposing data. The project has no ICO, no pre-mining, and no developer taxes. Development and maintenance rely primarily on community contributions. Its core developers have backgrounds spanning multiple ecosystems including Bitcoin, Zcash, Komodo, and Monero, making talent the core of the project.
In terms of consensus mechanism, Pirate Chain adopts Equihash PoW and introduces Delayed Proof of Work (dPoW) as an additional security layer. dPoW significantly increases the cost of launching a 51% attack by notarizing blocks on an external chain, which is also one of the common defense methods for small-scale PoW networks.
It's worth noting that after Komodo's acquisition by Gleec in December 2025, the market might have been concerned about Pirate Chain's dependence on Komodo's infrastructure. In response, the project team announced on January 7, 2026, that dPoW had successfully migrated from the original Komodo to Komodo Classic, with security mechanisms seamlessly continued and the network operating independently.
Torndo Cash (#769): Still operating after sanctions.
Tornado Cash (TORN) is a coin mixing protocol running on Ethereum that uses zk-SNARKs technology to break the direct link between on-chain transactions. Simply put, it makes ETH or ERC-20 tokens untraceable between deposits and withdrawals through a "pooling" method.
Once a star project on Ethereum, Tornado Cash's smart contracts were sanctioned in 2022 by the U.S. Treasury Department's OFAC, marking the first time immutable smart contracts had been sanctioned. Subsequently, developer Alexey Pertsev was sentenced in the Netherlands, and Roman Storm and Roman Semenov faced trial in the United States. As a result, Tornado Cash's governance token, TORN, was delisted from major exchanges.
The turning point came at the end of 2024. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that OFAC had overstepped its authority—immutable smart contract code does not constitute "property" and cannot be sanctioned, thereby overturning the sanctions decision targeting the contract itself.
But the legal battle did not end there. In 2025, Storm was partially convicted on charges of "illegally operating a money transfer business," while the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on money laundering and sanctions-related charges, and the case may continue in 2026.
It is worth noting that since its launch in 2019, Tornado Cash has been operating as a DAO with a completely open-source protocol. The original developers have long since lost control, and once the contract is deployed, it cannot be changed.
According to Bitrace, a cryptocurrency regulatory firm, Tornado Cash addresses saw a net inflow of 693,412 ETH in 2025, worth approximately $ 2.5 billion . In dollar terms, this represents a net inflow of about $1.4 billion, primarily in ETH. This indicates that even amidst sanctions, the demand for Ethereum privacy-focused transactions remains significant among native crypto users.
Dusk Network (#781): Putting privacy inside the system, not against it.
While most of the aforementioned projects choose to distance themselves from regulation, Dusk Network represents another route in the privacy field— attempting to coexist with compliance frameworks at the protocol level.
Founded in 2018, Dusk Network (DUSK) is a Layer 1 blockchain protocol focused on privacy and compliance. Created by technologists Jelle Pol and Emanuele Francioni, it primarily targets financial applications and the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs). Its mainnet officially launches in early 2025, and it employs a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) variant for its consensus mechanism.
Dusk's core technology is not "completely hiding everything," but rather revolves around "auditable privacy." By combining zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and homomorphic encryption (HE), Dusk allows transaction information to remain private by default, but can be audited through selective disclosure when required by compliance or law.
This is why Dusk positioned itself from the outset as a compliant financial infrastructure, explicitly supporting MiCA, MiFID II, and the EU DLT pilot program . This design reduces the pressure it faces and gives it more room to operate.
From a narrative perspective, Dusk is straddling two main themes that are currently attracting significant market attention: privacy and RWA . As traditional financial institutions begin to explore on-chain asset issuance and settlement, "regulatory privacy" should gradually become a real demand.
The latest data released by the Dusk Foundation on December 29 shows that more than 200 million Dusk tokens are currently staked, accounting for 36% of the total supply. This, to some extent, reflects the recognition of its long-term positioning by token holders.
