Against the backdrop of intensifying global competition for data sovereignty and rapid evolution of regulatory frameworks, the privacy crypto sector is undergoing a critical period of value reshaping. As of January 14, 2026, the total market capitalization of the privacy coin sector reached $22.7 billion, with Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC) together accounting for 85% of the market share.
The market is showing significant divergence around core privacy issues: Should privacy be completely untraceable or selectively disclosed? Should the technological path adhere to cryptographic purity or adapt to compliance requirements? What demands drive the value of the sector? ZEC plummeted 25% to a low of $360 on January 7 due to governance controversies, triggering approximately $100 million in funds to flow into XMR, which hit an all-time high of $700 on January 14 (a weekly increase of 52.59%), becoming a direct beneficiary of the governance crisis.
Beyond short-term fluctuations, four irreversible consensuses are emerging: selective anonymity is becoming the mainstream standard, privacy needs are a multi-faceted driving force, compliance is the path to scaling, and technological symbiosis is adaptable to diverse scenarios .
2026 Outlook : In the first half of the year, the sector will digest the short-term emotional impact of the ZEC governance controversy, while fully anonymous cryptocurrencies will face continued regulatory pressure. In the second half of the year, as the ZEC governance architecture becomes clearer and ZKP is rapidly implemented in financial compliance scenarios, verifiable privacy will serve as a moat for web3 native technology and become a standard feature of the digital economy. The value of the privacy sector will be completely anchored to the rigid demand driven by geopolitics and the practical effectiveness of compliance implementation.
1. Introduction: A Reassessment of Privacy Values Amid Geopolitical Shifts
We are experiencing a geopolitical restructuring of the digital domain. Data, as a strategic resource in the new era, has become a core target of competition and rivalry between nations. The EU's GDPR, China's regulations on cross-border data transfer, and the long-arm jurisdiction under the US CLOUD Act collectively outline an increasingly fragmented and adversarial global data governance landscape. In 2025, the average loss from global data breaches reached $4.4 million, with the US seeing an even higher $10.22 million (up 9% year-on-year). Malicious attacks accounted for 51% of these losses, with the healthcare industry suffering the highest losses at $7.42 million.
Against this backdrop, simple crypto assets are no longer sufficient to meet the challenges. Privacy-enhancing technologies that can safeguard data sovereignty and enable secure cross-border flows are leaping from a niche segment of cryptocurrency to a critical infrastructure supporting national security and commercial competitiveness in the digital age . In 2025, the privacy coin sector saw an overall increase of 288%, with ZEC rising by 782% and XMR by 123%, outperforming the broader market during a general correction.
This chapter will delve into the profound disagreements within the privacy field regarding definition, path, and value source under this macro trend, and demonstrate how these disagreements collectively point to a unified and irreversible future: the value of privacy technology is being redefined by geopolitics and compliance requirements.
2. Three Core Issues of Market Divergence
The disagreements in the privacy field are not simply a battle over technological routes, but a deep-seated struggle surrounding the essence of value, implementation paths, and survival logic. These disagreements are fully reflected in the market performance of two benchmark projects: Monero ($XMR) and Zcash ($ZEC).
2.1 The nature of privacy: complete untraceability vs. selective disclosure
The core controversy : Must privacy protection be based on complete anonymity? Or should users be allowed to make verifiable disclosures when necessary?
Monero represents a technological philosophy of complete anonymity. Through a triple mechanism of ring signatures, hidden addresses, and confidential transactions, $XMR completely hides the sender, receiver, and amount of a transaction, making all transactions private and untraceable by default.
Zcash employs a selective anonymity design. Through zk-SNARKs technology, users can choose to make transactions transparent or hidden, and selective disclosure is achieved through a key viewing mechanism. Users can prove transaction information to trusted parties (such as auditing firms or law enforcement agencies) without public exposure.
The duality of market feedback
On the one hand, complete anonymity meets the rigid demand for combating censorship. In the first quarter of 2025, approximately 11.4% of global cryptocurrency transactions involved privacy coins, and 29% of crypto users in the Asia-Pacific region regularly use privacy coins. Geopolitical instability and escalating surveillance have driven this trend.
On the other hand, optional anonymity has gained wider compliance acceptance. 97 countries worldwide have implemented strict compliance frameworks for privacy coins. The EU's AMLR will officially ban exchanges from handling anonymous wallets and privacy coins on July 1, 2027, and the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DIFC) banned privacy coin trading on January 12. Against this backdrop, ZEC has 17 trading pairs on 7 major exchanges, while XMR is supported by only 5 exchanges, all of which are perpetual contracts with no spot trading pairs. Grayscale's Zcash Trust manages $151.6 million, providing a compliant channel for institutional funds to enter the privacy coin market. Although ZEC's anonymous pool accounts for only 30%, its growth rate is 167%, indicating that even with choices available, user demand for privacy protection continues to grow. This optional design itself is becoming a key bridge connecting the crypto world and the traditional financial system.
2.2 Technical Approach: Purity of Ring Signatures vs. Auditability of Zero-Knowledge Proofs
The core debate : Should privacy technologies pursue the purity of cryptography, or should they ensure strong privacy while also taking into account auditability?
Monero's ring signature technology obfuscates at least 10 spoofed outputs, drowning out the true sender of each transaction and significantly increasing the difficulty of law enforcement tracking. This design achieves complete anonymity through mathematical and network-level obfuscation, requiring no trust in any third party. The computational efficiency of ring signatures allows XMR to maintain stable block production, with dynamically adjusted and relatively low transaction fees. Technically, XMR is advancing its FCMP++ upgrade; a community-funded optimization competition has improved the efficiency of the proof generation library by 95%, and plans are underway to add selective transparency functionality.
Zcash's zk-SNARKs technology takes a different approach. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) allow proving a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the statement itself. In simpler terms , to prove a house is yours, you don't need to bring anyone into your house; you only need to provide what they know is only found in that room. This perfectly aligns with the commercial and regulatory need for data to be available but not visible. ZEC users can prove they have sufficient funds to complete transactions and are not involved in money laundering without exposing transaction history or total assets. However, ZKP proofs take longer and are more computationally expensive than ring signatures, which limits the adoption of completely shielded transactions. The mainnet has completed the NU6.1 upgrade, and the roadmap includes a Tachyon scaling solution to improve scalability.
Market performance divergence
The purity of its technology has brought regulatory resistance. XMR was delisted from Binance spot trading in February 2024, and 73 major exchanges have delisted at least one fully anonymous privacy coin. This directly cuts off liquidity from mainstream fiat currencies, limiting its value capture capabilities and liquidity.
Auditability, on the other hand, opens the door to enterprise-level applications. The global ZKP market size is projected to grow from $1.28 billion in 2024 to $7.59 billion in 2033, representing a CAGR of 22.1%. Applications have expanded to include financial fraud prevention, private stablecoin payments, HIPAA/GDPR-compliant medical data sharing, and anonymous voting and identity verification in government systems.
It's worth noting that XMR's FCMP++ upgrade plan adds the ability to view keys externally, which essentially moves towards selective disclosure. Meanwhile, ZEC's Tachyon scaling solution aims to reduce the computational cost of ZKP and improve the performance of fully shielded transactions. This convergence of technological approaches suggests a potential future trend of integration.
2.3 Value-Driven: Privacy Premium and Regulatory Arbitrage vs. Compliance-Based Scale Path
The core controversy : What demands drive the value of the privacy sector? Is it legitimate privacy protection needs, or regulatory arbitrage or even illegal use? Can the market continue to expand under regulatory pressure?
Cryptocurrency fundraising during the Russia-Ukraine war, data compliance challenges in cross-border trade, competition in digital infrastructure between nations, and the growing awareness of data sovereignty among individuals and institutions—these factors collectively constitute a long-term, rigid demand for privacy protection: privacy protection has evolved from a personal preference to a strategic necessity for nations, businesses, and even individuals . Monero, with its complete anonymity, represents the ultimate expression of this privacy demand, but this demand itself is multifaceted and complex, being widely used in Dark Web transactions, as a money laundering tool for illicit activities, or as a tool for regulatory arbitrage.
Therefore, it is inevitable to face the blow from global regulatory compliance: 97 countries worldwide have established strict compliance frameworks for privacy coins. The EU's AMLR will ban exchanges and custodians from handling anonymous wallets and privacy coins on July 1, 2027. The MiCA and AML package of regulations requires CASP to enforce KYC, travel rules, and crack down on coin mixers; the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DIFC) has banned privacy coins. The massive delisting wave on exchanges has directly cut off the liquidity of fully anonymous coins from mainstream fiat currencies.
The market prices prices in a tug-of-war.
ZEC's optional anonymity design has maintained relatively good compliance support, with the Grayscale Trust providing a compliant entry point for institutional funds. However, the governance crisis triggered by the collective resignation of the ECC core development team on January 7th due to disagreements with the Bootstrap board over the commercialization of the Zashi wallet sparked market concerns about a project fork, causing the price to plummet 25% to a low of $360 in a single week. Although the original team established CashZ, promising to continue development and not issue new coins, and the mainnet is operating normally, GitHub activity has dropped to its lowest level since November 2021, and social media sentiment has collapsed by 90%, indicating significant short-term downward pressure. XMR's recent strong performance is mainly a direct result of capital outflows caused by the ZEC governance crisis and risk-averse rotation within the sector; its long-term price support still comes from the structural demand for a privacy premium .
The essence of this game lies in whether privacy premiums and regulatory arbitrage can offset the liquidity contraction brought about by global regulation; and whether the completely anonymous nature of technology can find a place to survive in the wave of compliance . Judging from the current market performance, XMR will rely on its technological resilience to find a place to survive in DEXs and the underground market, but will always face the long-term threat of liquidity depletion; while ZEC, although experiencing governance turmoil, retains greater possibility for future integration with TradeFi due to the compliance friendliness of its selective anonymity technology.
2.4 ZEC Governance Controversy: The Boundary Between Short-Term Shocks and Long-Term Impacts
The ZEC governance controversy on January 7, 2026, provides an excellent case study for understanding the commercialization challenges of the privacy sector.
The entire engineering team at Electric Coin Company (ECC) resigned due to disagreements with Bootstrap's non-profit board over the commercialization of the Zashi wallet. The team accused board members of deviating from Zcash's original privacy mission and altering employment terms that rendered effective work impossible, ultimately leading to the "constructive dismissal" of CEO Josh Swihart. The core conflict lay in the ECC team's desire to accelerate product launch and user growth through the commercialization of the Zashi wallet, while the Bootstrap board insisted on a non-profit structure to maintain decentralized governance. This directly caused the price of $ZEC to plummet from $503 on January 7th to a low of $360 on January 10th, a 25% drop in a single week, with a maximum single-day drop exceeding 15%.
However, further investigation revealed that the disagreement was limited to the commercial operation architecture of the Zashi wallet and did not involve the development and iteration of the Zcash mainnet protocol layer . The Zcash Foundation explicitly stated that the network remains decentralized and operates normally, block production and transaction settlement are all normal, and no single organization controls Zcash. CashZ, founded by the original ECC team, adopts a startup structure to accelerate innovation and commercialization, promising to continue the development of the Zcash ecosystem and not issue new coins, with the goal of expanding Zcash to billions of users. On-chain data shows that the size of the hidden pool, representing user demand for optional anonymity, continued to grow during the controversy (from 23% to 28-30%), indicating that the core value proposition remained unaffected.
Therefore, from a long-term perspective, this turmoil should be viewed as a growing pain in the project's commercialization process, rather than a failure in terms of technology or business model. If governance issues are resolved and the flow of funds is clarified, ZEC's narrative as BTC insurance remains valid.
3. Unification Amidst Differences: Four Irreversible Trends
Despite heated debates in the market regarding the definition, technological path, and value source of privacy, a deeper analysis of the underlying logic of all parties reveals that four irreversible consensuses are forming, which are collectively reshaping the value foundation of the privacy sector.
3.1 Consensus 1: Selective anonymity has become the core of privacy and an industry standard.
Whether from the perspective of regulatory tolerance or the feasibility of commercial applications, completely anonymous narratives are giving way to controlled anonymity.
Firstly, there is the issue of unified regulatory compliance . Data regulations in major jurisdictions worldwide do not support complete anonymity, but leave room for controlled disclosure. The EU's GDPR requires data minimization, while MiCA requires KYC/AML verification. These two seem contradictory, but ZKP provides a solution by "proving the facts without exposing the data." China's "Measures for the Authentication of Personal Information Export" allows for cross-border data flow where "data is usable but not visible." The US GENIUS Act and the pending CLARITY Act both enhance regulatory oversight, indirectly driving the demand for compliant privacy.
The market's choices are also showing a clear signal: ZEC, despite its governance turmoil, still holds a 30% market share in privacy coins, and its selective anonymity design is key to maintaining its mainstream status. The comparative data is also quite telling:
- Exchange support : ZEC has 17 trading pairs on 7 exchanges, while XMR is supported by only 5 exchanges, all of which are perpetual contracts;
- Institutional funding channel : Grayscale Zcash Trust, with $151.6 million in assets under management (growing 228% by 2025), provides an entry point for compliant institutions; XMR has no similar product.
- User adoption trends : ZEC's covert pool increased from 11% to 30%, covering 70% of total transactions, while XMR just suffered a 51% attack in September 2025.
The fundamental shift lies in the transformation of value from concealment to control: "verifiable when disclosure is needed, and hidden when protection is required" has become the greatest common denominator in balancing innovation and regulation, and connecting the encrypted and traditional worlds . This shift has given auditable privacy technologies such as ZKP a structural advantage.
3.2 Consensus Two: Privacy needs are driven by multiple factors, and the auxiliary channel role in capital rotation is becoming apparent.
The need for privacy protection is multi-layered and ongoing, including legitimate privacy claims, regulatory arbitrage motives, and the objectively existing use by black and gray industries. In other words, the value of the privacy sector comes from the combination of these diverse needs, rather than a single cause .
The diverse structure of its demand mainly stems from the following points:
- Legitimate privacy needs include: protection of personal financial privacy, cross-border payments for businesses, financial fraud prevention, and sharing of medical data.
- Regulatory arbitrage needs: tax planning, cross-border wealth allocation, capital control circumvention, DeFi, etc.
- Illegal demands from the black and gray market include: Dark Web transactions, money laundering, ransomware, etc.
- Other factors include: speculation based on supply scarcity, and HODL (Hope for Technology) among tech enthusiasts.
Another noteworthy phenomenon is that privacy coins have acted as conduits for funds entering and exiting the crypto market in specific scenarios during this round of market activity. With stricter capital controls and increased KYC requirements, some funds are choosing privacy coins as an intermediary for anonymized deposits . Funds first enter a ZEC hidden pool for anonymization before exiting to a transparent address or cross-chain bridge to prevent address tracking. Currently, this primarily serves the needs of regulatory arbitrage and black market activities, rather than the overall market demand. Mainstream deposit and withdrawal channels still rely on BTC/ETH spot ETFs, direct stablecoin exchanges, and compliant exchange fiat currency channels.
Market performance confirms this, with the privacy coin sector surging 288% in 2025. This performance cannot be explained solely by demand from the black and gray markets, nor can it be simply attributed to geopolitical hedging or regulatory arbitrage. A more reasonable explanation is the resonance of diverse privacy needs .
Privacy will be a key narrative in 2026, but the core logic has shifted from "resisting state surveillance" to the commercialization and compliance of data autonomy. Simply dividing privacy needs into "just geopolitical risk aversion" or "a tool for evil crimes" fails to explain the complex realities of the market. Privacy technology itself is value-neutral; its value is driven by society's multi-layered demands for privacy : from completely legal to gray areas to explicitly illegal, forming a continuous spectrum.
The market differentiation between XMR and ZEC is essentially due to their different positions within this spectrum: the former serves the entire spectrum, including more black and gray market usage needs; while the latter focuses on compliance, excluding illegal activities while retaining privacy protection in compliant scenarios through selective disclosure.
3.3 Consensus 3: Compliance is the only path to mainstream applications and large-scale funding.
The wave of delistings by exchanges has clearly drawn a red line. If the privacy sector wants to shed its niche, marginal, or even illegal labels, it must proactively embrace compliance. This is not a compromise, but a prerequisite for large-scale survival and development .
While XMR faces continued pressure from regulators, ZEC maintains strong exchange support and institutional funding channels thanks to its selective anonymity: in addition to Grayscale's Zcash Trust providing compliant access for institutions, there is also the DAT exposure established by Cypherpunk Technologies; ZKP technology is rapidly penetrating enterprise-level applications, including financial anti-fraud, the privacy stablecoin zkUSD, medical data sharing, government voting and identity verification, etc.
All of this proves one point: only compliance can open the door to enterprise-level applications, government cooperation, and traditional capital, enabling the leap from niche tools to infrastructure.
Emerging privacy projects in 2026, such as Zama (FHE fully homomorphic encryption), Railgun (EVM privacy), Aztec (ZK-rollup), and Arcium (Solana confidential computing), all adopt programmable, selective disclosure designs to build a "Privacy 2.0" ecosystem. This also confirms a trend: future mainstream privacy products will inevitably be compliance-friendly products.
3.4 Consensus 4: Technological Symbiosis, Differentiated Adaptation to Diverse Scenarios
The debate over whether ZKP or ring signatures are superior is gradually giving way to a more rational understanding: no single technology can be applied to all scenarios .
ZKP will dominate compliant scenarios , including finance, data trading, government affairs, and healthcare, where it needs to integrate with existing legal and commercial systems. Ring signatures will retain their use in censorship-resistant scenarios , addressing specific needs such as small payments, cross-border remittances, and black market activities where censorship resistance is paramount. While XMR faces delisting from exchanges, it remains active in the DEX and P2P markets.
At the same time, we also see the technological evolution of the convergence trend :
XMR's FCMP++ upgrade plan adds the "outward viewing key" function, essentially moving towards selective disclosure; ZEC's Tachyon scaling solution aims to reduce ZKP computational costs and improve the performance of fully shielded transactions; emerging hybrid technology stacks, such as FHE, privacy smart contracts, and ZK-rollups, all aim to provide modular solutions for different risk appetites.
The future landscape is more likely to see the coexistence of multiple technologies, forming a layered ecosystem based on different risk appetites and application needs. Complete anonymity technology retains value in specific scenarios, while auditable privacy technology will become mainstream infrastructure; the two are complementary rather than substitutive.
4. 2026 Trend Outlook: Value Reshaping from Competition to Integration
Based on an in-depth analysis of both disagreements and consensus, combined with on-chain data, the derivatives market, institutional reports, and social narratives, I make the following predictions regarding the development trajectory of the privacy sector in 2026:
4.1 2026 H1: Increased divergence, sentiment digestion and liquidity restructuring under regulatory pressure
XMR Survival Challenge
Cryptocurrencies with complete anonymity, such as XMR, will continue to face substantial regulatory pressure globally. The EU's AMLR transition period means that more platforms will delist XMR.
Market performance expectations need to consider multiple factors : continued regulatory crackdowns and limited liquidity may lead to a further decoupling of XMR prices from the mainstream market, increasing volatility. The market seems to have priced in the illicit use of XMR as part of a privacy premium , rather than a risk discount. This paradoxical pricing reflects the stability of illicit demand, the resilience of regulatory arbitrage, and speculators' risk appetite. However, this pricing may face recalibration in the first half of 2026. If regulatory actions lead to a decline in actual transaction volume, or if major criminal cases trigger public pressure, the market may reassess the sustainability of the illicit component in the privacy premium.
ZEC's protracted period
ZEC will be caught in a tug-of-war between "demand support" and "the aftermath of governance controversies." The key variables in Q1 lie in the CashZ team's execution capabilities and the speed of rebuilding community trust. If operations proceed smoothly, the roadmap is effectively implemented (especially with the Tachyon expansion), GitHub activity returns to normal, and with some arbitrage funds flowing back from XMR and the steady growth of hidden liquidity pools, the price is expected to break through previous highs again.
Validation period for emerging privacy technologies such as FHE
In contrast to the survival struggle of traditional privacy coins, programmable privacy technologies such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) are in a critical verification period from proof of concept to commercialization .
In Q1-Q2, they will face the following major challenges:
1. Technology Maturity Verification: Zama plans to advance Solana extensions and FHE ASICs. If hardware acceleration fails to materialize as scheduled, it may delay the commercialization process.
2. Developer ecosystem building: The activity level and SDK adoption rate of testnets for projects such as Fhenix and Inco will determine the richness of applications after the mainnet launch;
3. Implementation of Institutional Partnerships: Whether partnerships with Open Zeppelin, Conduit, Circle Research, and others can translate into actual deployments will impact market confidence;
4. Token price stability: After the mainnet launch and the TGE token, can it withstand the selling pressure?
4.2 2026 H2: Consensus Deepens, Compliance and Privacy Technologies Accelerate Integration with Traditional Finance
As the ZEC governance structure stabilizes (expected to be completed in Q2-Q3) and market sentiment gradually recovers, investors will refocus their attention on the fundamentals of privacy technology: practical applications . The core narrative in the second half of the year will shift from the "ZKP vs. ring signature technology debate" to the "ZKP + FHE technology symbiosis," where the two will leverage their complementary advantages in different scenarios to jointly drive the leap of privacy technology from edge tools to digital economic infrastructure.
ZKP technology will accelerate its penetration in application scenarios , such as:
In the financial sector: privacy needs for private DeFi transactions and wallets, anti-fraud and credit assessment, cross-border payments and private stablecoins, institutional-grade private blockchains, RWA scenarios, etc.
In the Crypto and AI fields: KYC, on-chain reputation systems, KYA (Know Your Agent), confidential AI computing, combating AI data breaches, etc.
In the fields of government and healthcare: anonymous voting, secure identity verification, insurance verification and medical record sharing, cross-departmental data collaboration and joint computing, etc.
The enterprise-level breakthroughs in FHE technology and its integration with the AI economy will bring about the core narrative of "Privacy 2.0" : not only protecting data anonymity but also supporting direct computation in an encrypted state , enabling commercial applications where "data is usable but not visible." This will complement ZKP's "verifiable but not visible" approach, jointly building the next-generation privacy technology stack.
At that time, the valuation logic of the privacy sector will undergo a fundamental shift. Its value will no longer be solely linked to speculative sentiment in the cryptocurrency market, but will begin to be anchored in the actual economic value it can create in resolving data sovereignty disputes, reducing cross-border compliance costs, and empowering the flow of data elements .
4.3 Risk Warning
1. Risk of extreme regulation
The prospect of major economies imposing a blanket ban on privacy-enhancing technologies (although unlikely) would destroy the legitimate development space for the entire sector.
2. Risks of technological breakthroughs
Cutting-edge cryptographic technologies such as ZKP have been found to have significant security vulnerabilities (e.g., the zk-SNARK trusted setup has been broken); quantum computing has made unexpected progress (e.g., a breakthrough in Shor's algorithm), causing a disruptive impact on existing privacy protocols. Furthermore, if XMR's FCMP++ upgrade fails or introduces new vulnerabilities, it will severely affect trust, and if ZEC's Tachyon scaling cannot effectively reduce ZKP costs, it will also limit adoption to some extent.
3. Risk of application falling short of expectations
Privacy technologies have failed to achieve large-scale deployment in key industries, preventing the narrative from translating into revenue and growth.
4. Risk of liquidity depletion
If more exchanges delist privacy coins (especially XMR) and DEXs are unable to effectively absorb the liquidity, it will lead to a vicious cycle of price discovery failure, liquidity shortage, soaring volatility, and market makers exiting the market.
5. ZEC-specific risks
If the CashZ team fails to effectively execute the development roadmap, or if the new corporate structure triggers additional governance disputes; if the Bootstrap board's conflict with the community remains unresolved, there is a risk of a chain fork; and if the Grayscale Trust experiences redemptions due to governance issues, it will impact institutional investor confidence.
Conclusion
Geopolitical and regulatory maneuvering is redefining the value of privacy, but the composition of this value is far more complex than a simple black-and-white dichotomy. Amidst the multiple tensions between regulation and innovation, anonymity and compliance, and decentralization and commercialization, privacy is being redefined: privacy with controllable visibility is true privacy.
The future of privacy technology belongs to those projects that can find the optimal balance between strong privacy protection, auditability, and commercial viability .
XMR is favored by the black and gray industries for its technological purity, but due to strong regulatory crackdown, it can only seek survival space in the DEX and P2P markets, facing the harsh reality of constantly squeezed liquidity.
ZEC meets compliance requirements through optional anonymity, serving as a bridge for traditional financial institutions to access on-chain privacy. However, its governance controversies expose the fragility of decentralized governance and foreshadow the inevitability of commercialization and compliance.
Emerging privacy technologies such as FHE are seeking new value in the "Privacy 2.0" narrative, with the potential to unlock trillion-dollar markets such as enterprise applications, the AI economy, and data collaboration. However, 2026 will still be a critical period of verification from proof of concept to commercialization.
In 2026, privacy will leap from a niche cryptocurrency sector to an indispensable infrastructure of the digital economy: technologies that can achieve verifiable disclosure or programmable compliance while protecting privacy will gain scalable institutional space; while fully anonymous technologies, although valuable, will be limited to marginal markets with limited liquidity and low regulatory tolerance .
This is the core logic behind the redefinition of privacy value through regulatory competition, technological evolution, and market choices.
