Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
In the current environment where the market is experiencing severe fluctuations and Chinese memes are being rapidly created and quickly discarded, if there is any narrative worth our continued attention, privacy is certainly one of them.
From the surge of Zcash in 2025 to Monero breaking an 8-year high in 2026, the performance of privacy-related assets is no longer just a brief emotional return but has been reinserted into the long-term proposition of crypto infrastructure.
In a recent article titled "Privacy trends for 2026" published by a16z at the beginning of the year, privacy is re-examined in the next phase of the evolution of cryptographic technology from multiple perspectives, including decentralized communication, data access control, and secure engineering methodologies (recommended reading: "Zcash is just the beginning, how a16z redefines the privacy narrative for 2026?").
In this context, privacy is no longer just a tool for "resisting regulation" but a foundational capability that supports the sustainable operation of crypto systems. This issue of Odaily Planet Daily systematically reviews several privacy-related assets. Let’s take a look at which projects are currently gaining real market favor.
Monero (#15): The Return of Privacy Fundamentalism After 8 Years
On January 13, the price of Monero (XMR) broke through $650. This round of increase started at the beginning of 2024, with a rise of over 500%. However, more symbolically than the increase is that this is the first effective breakthrough of XMR beyond the historical high of the 2017 bull market cycle after 8 years.
In the world of cryptocurrency, Monero may be one of the most thorough and resilient existences in terms of privacy attributes. Since its inception in 2014, it has always regarded "default privacy, enforced privacy, and untraceability" as its core design philosophy.
In terms of specific implementation, Monero systematically erases on-chain analyzability through multiple layers of cryptographic mechanisms. Ring Signatures are used to hide the identity of the transaction sender: real inputs are mixed with multiple historical "decoy" outputs on the blockchain to form a "ring," where external observers can only determine that "someone in the ring is spending funds," but cannot judge who it is; Stealth Addresses automatically generate one-time receiving addresses for each transaction, allowing only the receiver to identify this income by viewing the key, thus severing the permanent association between the receiver and the public address; and RingCT further hides the transaction amount, using range proof technologies like Pedersen commitments and Bulletproofs++, ensuring that the amount remains invisible while still allowing the network to verify that there is no creation of coins out of thin air or double spending.
With these mechanisms combined, all transaction senders, receivers, and amounts are hidden by default, and there are no traceable transparent records on the entire chain, providing extremely high anonymity and fungibility, far exceeding coins with optional privacy.
However, as the saying goes, "having a gem can be a crime," this extreme design has also made Monero one of the least friendly existences from a regulatory perspective. Under ongoing compliance pressure, by 2024, mainstream exchanges like Binance and OKX successively delisted all spot trading pairs of XMR, retaining only contract trading.
Zcash (#28): A Severe Governance Shock
The biggest contributor to this round of privacy resurgence is Zcash, which you can read more about in "The Revival of Privacy Coins: From Binance Delisting Candidates to a 13-fold Surge, ZEC's Lightning Rebirth."
However, on January 8, Josh Swihart, CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the development team behind Zcash (ZEC), stated that the majority of the Bootstrap board (the nonprofit organization behind ECC that supports Zcash) members, particularly Zaki Manian, Christina Garman, Alan Fairless, and Michelle Lai (referred to as the ZCAM group), have clearly deviated from Zcash's mission. Under the presumed dismissal decision of ZCAM, the entire ECC team chose to resign collectively. It is worth noting that since 2020, after the majority shareholders chose to donate their shares, ECC has gradually transitioned to a nonprofit structure, with governance functions taken over by Bootstrap. After the announcement, ZEC briefly fell below $362, with a drop of over 40%.
Bootstrap subsequently released a clarification statement, stating that the dispute arose from legal restrictions encountered while seeking external investment. Discussions have now begun on "external investment and alternative structures for Zashi privatization," and they are working with legal advisors to ensure that all paths comply with U.S. nonprofit laws while not deviating from Zcash's long-term mission and not harming the broader community's interests.
However, this statement did not immediately reverse market sentiment.
Nonetheless, 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 goals. Its codebase is fully open-source, consensus rules are maintained by independent nodes globally, and ecological development is supported by diverse organizations and contributors. As the protocol's guardian, the mission of the Zcash Foundation includes: maintaining protocol security, funding independent research and engineering practices, promoting governance decentralization, and advocating for privacy as a fundamental human right.
Humanity (#215): Not a Privacy Coin, Reconstructing "Privacy Identity"
Unlike the aforementioned projects, Humanity Protocol (H) does not focus on "financial privacy" but attempts to reconstruct the balance of privacy and trust at the digital identity level.
Humanity combines fingerprint biometrics with zero-knowledge proofs to verify that users are real humans while not disclosing any personal data, aiming to build a decentralized trust layer that is resistant to witch hunts. The project was launched in 2023, with the H token set to go live in June 2025.
In terms of application, Humanity has announced a partnership with Mastercard to combine its open financial connections with the Human ID identity system, enabling users to access credit, loans, and other real financial services without exposing their privacy.
In July 2025, Nasdaq-listed company Prenetics announced that it would include the H token in its crypto asset treasury. The company had previously purchased 187 BTC for $20 million, making it one of the first healthcare companies to allocate a Bitcoin treasury. Perhaps for this reason, along with financial actions, the price of the H token rose from $0.026 to $0.4, with a maximum increase of 14 times, before falling back and undergoing a full turnover, currently recovering to around $0.17.
Compared to other privacy projects, Humanity is still in an earlier stage. However, the direction it has taken in "privacy identity" clearly provides another way to open the privacy narrative.
Railgun (#331): The "Private Wallet Layer" of DeFi
Railgun is a decentralized privacy protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs, operating on Ethereum and multiple EVM-compatible chains. Its core goal is not simply to provide anonymous transfers but to offer composable privacy interaction capabilities for DeFi users.
Unlike mixers like Tornado Cash, Railgun is more like a "private wallet layer," allowing users to build private balances directly within the protocol and interact privately with any EVM smart contract. The entire process is non-custodial, open-source, and does not require trust in third parties. It allows users to completely hide wallet addresses, transaction amounts, and strategy details while performing transactions, lending, providing liquidity, or mining, without sacrificing the decentralized characteristics of DeFi.
The project was launched in 2021, and after Tornado Cash was sanctioned, Railgun introduced the "Proof of Innocence" mechanism in 2024 to reduce the risk of being misidentified as an illegal tool, while gradually expanding to Layer 2 to lower usage costs.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is one of the early supporters of Railgun and has made donations through the protocol multiple times to avoid on-chain tracking.
Dune data shows that since 2022, the use of Railgun funds has remained active, especially after Ethereum Gas costs significantly decreased in 2024, with activity noticeably increasing. As of now, the cumulative trading volume has reached $4.49 billion, with ETH valued at approximately $4.03 billion.
Pirate Chain (#488): Treating "Privacy" as the Only Premise, No Compromises
Pirate Chain (ARRR) is another cryptocurrency project focused on privacy protection, aiming to provide the most anonymous digital currency. Launched in 2018, it was inspired by Zcash's zk-SNARKs technology. However, unlike Zcash's optional privacy, Pirate Chain enforces 100% mandatory privacy, forming the world's largest organic anonymous set to prevent information leakage through online activities and supporting rapid verification without exposing data. The project has no ICO, no pre-mining, and no developer tax fees, relying primarily on community contributions for development and maintenance. Its core developers come from various ecosystems, including Bitcoin, Zcash, Komodo, and Monero, making talent the core of the project.
In terms of consensus mechanism, Pirate Chain uses 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 a common defensive measure for small PoW networks.
It is worth noting that after Komodo announced its acquisition by Gleec in December 2025, the market may worry about Pirate Chain's dependence on Komodo's infrastructure. In response, the project announced on January 7, 2026, that dPoW has successfully migrated from the original Komodo to Komodo Classic, ensuring a seamless continuation of the security mechanism and allowing the network to operate independently.
Tornado Cash (#769): Still Operating After Sanctions
Tornado Cash (TORN) is a mixing protocol running on Ethereum that uses zk-SNARKs technology to break the direct link between on-chain transactions. In simple terms, it allows ETH or ERC-20 tokens to lose traceability between deposit and withdrawal through a "pool mixing" method.
Once, it was one of the star projects on Ethereum. However, in 2022, the U.S. Treasury's OFAC directly listed Tornado Cash's smart contracts on the SDN sanctions list, marking the first time immutable smart contracts were sanctioned in history. Subsequently, developer Alexey Pertsev was sentenced in the Netherlands, while Roman Storm and Roman Semenov faced trial in the U.S. As a result, Tornado Cash's governance token TORN was gradually delisted from mainstream exchanges.
A turning point occurred 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 against the contract itself.
However, the legal disputes did not end there. In 2025, Storm was partially convicted on charges of "operating an unlicensed money transmission business," while the jury could not reach a consensus on money laundering and sanctions-related charges, and related cases may continue to progress in 2026.
It is noteworthy that since its launch in 2019, Tornado Cash has operated as a DAO, with the protocol being fully open-source. The initial developers have long lost control, and the contract cannot be changed once deployed.
According to monitoring by crypto regulatory technology firm Bitrace, in 2025, Tornado Cash addresses received a total of 693,412 ETH, with a total value of approximately $2.5 billion; in dollar terms, the net inflow for the year was about $1.4 billion, primarily in ETH. This indicates that even after experiencing sanctions, the demand for Ethereum privacy transfers remains significant among crypto-native users.
Dusk Network (#781): Integrating Privacy into Institutional Frameworks Rather Than Opposing Them
While the aforementioned projects mostly choose to maintain distance from regulation, Dusk Network represents another route in the privacy track—attempting to coexist with compliance frameworks at the protocol level.
Dusk Network (DUSK), founded in 2018, is a Layer 1 blockchain protocol focused on privacy protection and compliance, established by tech experts Jelle Pol and Emanuele Francioni, primarily targeting financial applications and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Its mainnet officially launched in early 2025, and it employs a variant of Proof of Stake (PoS) for its consensus mechanism.
The technical core of Dusk is not about "hiding everything completely," but revolves around "auditable privacy." By combining zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) with homomorphic encryption (HE), Dusk allows transaction information to remain private by default, but enables auditing through selective disclosure when compliance or legal requirements arise.
Because of this, Dusk has positioned itself as a compliant financial infrastructure from the start, explicitly supporting MiCA, MiFID II, and the EU DLT pilot regime. This design allows it to face less pressure and have a larger space for survival.
From a narrative perspective, Dusk straddles two currently high-profile market themes: privacy + RWA. As traditional financial institutions begin to explore on-chain asset issuance and settlement, "regulatable privacy" is likely to become a real demand.
The latest data disclosed by the Dusk Foundation on December 29 shows that over 200 million DUSK are currently staked, accounting for 36% of the supply. This, to some extent, reflects the recognition of holders regarding its long-term positioning.
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