Author: Changan I Biteye Content Team

The recent surge of ZEC has brought the long-quiet privacy sector back to the center of the market.

Beyond the price increase, more importantly, it has reignited discussions in the market about the narrative of privacy: In today's world where on-chain data is increasingly transparent and transaction behaviors are easier to track, is privacy still a niche demand?

In the past, privacy was often understood as the anonymous needs of a minority of users. However, as more funds, transactions, and strategies move on-chain, privacy has begun to become a more pressing issue: If all actions are visible, will on-chain finance truly be safer?

Starting from this round of ZEC's market performance, let's explore what the market is discussing behind the renewed attention to the privacy sector.

I. Full Transparency on the Chain: From the Cornerstone of Trust to a Targeted Weakness

The brand risk brought by on-chain transparency first appeared in lending and liquidation scenarios.

As early as the last cycle, when some institutions or large holders borrowed on-chain, collateral, debt scale, health factors, and liquidation prices were almost all publicly visible. By monitoring these addresses, one could clearly see their risk positions.

When a large holder's liquidation price is visible to everyone, other traders may trade around this liquidation line. The price is driven into the liquidation range, triggering a liquidation, and then quickly rebounds.

These cases made many people realize for the first time: complete transparency of on-chain data also means it can be targeted.

In this round, this issue has become even more apparent.

With platforms like Hyperliquid gaining popularity, more and more whales are starting to open positions on-chain. Large positions, opening directions, margin changes, and liquidation prices can all be targeted by the market.

• For ordinary users, transparency may just mean information disclosure.

• But for large traders, transparency sometimes equates to exposing their trading intentions and risk positions to all counterparties.

Therefore, the renewed attention to the privacy sector is not just because certain tokens have risen, nor is it merely a rotation of established privacy coins.

The deeper issue is: Can a completely transparent on-chain environment continue to support larger-scale and more professional on-chain financial activities?

Users need transparency to build trust, but they also need privacy to protect assets, strategies, and transaction security.

II. Overview of the Three Core Maps of the Privacy Sector

From this round of market performance, the privacy sector is no longer just about established anonymous coins. It can roughly be divided into three categories: one category includes established privacy assets like ZEC and XMR; another category represents privacy infrastructure like Railgun and Aztec; and the last category includes projects like Genius, SilentSwap, and 0xBow that emphasize trading privacy and compliance.

1. Established Privacy Coins: Asset and Payment Attributes

Zcash (ZEC): An Established Privacy Asset on the ZK Route

X: @zcash | XHunt Ranking: 13364

Zcash is a representative of established privacy coins and one of the first crypto projects to use zero-knowledge proofs for privacy payments. Unlike ordinary public chains where all transactions are publicly traceable, Zcash supports both transparent and privacy address modes.

Users can conduct public transfers like using Bitcoin or hide the transaction parties and amounts through shielded transactions.

Zcash officially defines itself as "encrypted electronic cash," emphasizing its attributes for privacy peer-to-peer payments.

💰 Token Performance:

Naval Ravikant once stated on X: If Bitcoin is insurance against fiat risk, then Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin's transparency risk.

In terms of price performance, ZEC is one of the standout main assets in this round of the privacy sector, with its price rising from $200 in March to $620.

Monero (XMR): Default Privacy as the Foundation

X: @monero | XHunt Ranking: 4812

Monero is also one of the most representative projects among established privacy coins, with its core positioning as default privacy payments.

Unlike Zcash's optional privacy, Monero is designed to have privacy as the default state, hiding the sender, receiver, and transfer amount in transactions.

Default privacy makes it purer in the direction of anonymous payments, but it also faces higher regulatory pressure and liquidity pressure from exchanges in the long term.

💰 Token Performance:

However, from this round of market performance, XMR's price performance has not been particularly outstanding. Although the overall market environment is not strong, compared to ZEC, XMR clearly lacks elasticity.

Dash (DASH): An Established Payment Project with Optional Privacy Features

X: @Dashpay | XHunt Ranking: 11376

Dash is an early market entrant among established payment-oriented crypto projects, with its privacy feature being optional, primarily achieved through PrivateSend.

The core idea of PrivateSend is to enhance transaction privacy through a mixing mechanism, allowing users to hide the source of funds and transaction paths when needed. However, from a positioning perspective, Dash is not purely a privacy coin; its earlier main narrative was actually about fast payments, low fees, and everyday transaction use.

💰 Token Performance:
From this round of market performance, DASH has seen some phase-based rebounds, but its overall performance is not as prominent as ZEC. The current price is about 43 USDT; while it still possesses the label of an established payment project with optional privacy, the market's pricing for it is more about sector rotation rather than a repricing of privacy main assets.

Secret Network (SCRT): Smart Contract Level Privacy Infrastructure

X: @SecretNetwork | XHunt Ranking: 3677

Secret Network is an early public chain project focusing on smart contract-level privacy, with the core feature being secret contracts. Unlike traditional privacy coins that mainly focus on transfer privacy, it aims to solve the data privacy issues at the application layer: Can smart contracts handle sensitive data during execution without exposing all content on the public chain?

The advantage of Secret Network is that it places privacy capabilities at the application layer. For applications like DeFi, NFTs, gaming, identity, and data markets, many scenarios are not suitable for completely public user data. The significance of secret contracts is that they allow applications to handle encrypted data while still retaining on-chain verifiability.

💰 Token Performance:
In terms of price performance, SCRT has not significantly benefited from the recent return of the privacy narrative. The current price is about 0.08 USDT, remaining in a low range for the long term.

2. New Generation Privacy Infrastructure: Empowering the Application Layer

Railgun (RAIL): Bringing Privacy into DeFi Transactions

X: @RAILGUN_Project | XHunt Ranking: 4099

Railgun is an on-chain privacy system aimed at the EVM ecosystem, primarily serving DeFi scenarios. It does not aim to create a new privacy payment asset but hopes to bring privacy features into DeFi transactions.

On public chains, users' wallet balances, transaction paths, interaction objects, and fund flows can be tracked.

• For ordinary users, this means asset exposure.

• For traders, it means strategies may be copied or even targeted.

Railgun aims to solve this problem: allowing users to hide their on-chain behavior while participating in DeFi.

It is worth noting that Vitalik recently mentioned the underlying issues faced by privacy protocols when discussing the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation. He believes that protocols like smart contract wallets and Railgun still need to submit transactions through intermediaries to go on-chain, which itself is a vulnerability.

💰 Token Performance:

RAIL has recently benefited significantly from the warming up of the privacy sector, with its market cap rising from 60 M in April to 240 M now.

Compared to high market cap main assets like ZEC, RAIL is more like a high-elasticity target in the privacy sector, making it easier to surge quickly when the market heats up, but liquidity and volatility are also more pronounced.

Aztec (AZTEC): From Privacy DeFi to Privacy Smart Contract Network

X: @aztecnetwork | XHunt Ranking: 760

Aztec is a privacy L2 in the Ethereum ecosystem, positioned to provide programmable privacy for applications.

It is not a new project. Aztec previously launched zk.money and Aztec Connect to provide Ethereum users with privacy transfers and privacy DeFi access. However, in 2023, the team chose to shut down Aztec Connect and shift its focus to a new privacy smart contract network.

At the end of 2025, AZTEC conducted a public sale, using a Continuous Clearing Auction mechanism, with the public offering price around $0.047.

💰 Token Performance:

From the secondary market performance, AZTEC's overall performance after launch has not been strong, with the current price around $0.025, still below the public offering cost. However, with the privacy sector warming up again, AZTEC has also seen a noticeable rebound recently.

3. YZi Labs Investment Layout: Focusing on Balancing Trading Privacy and Compliance

Genius Terminal (GENIUS): A Privacy Trading Terminal for Professional Traders

X: @GeniusTerminal | XHunt Ranking: 7845

Genius Terminal is an on-chain trading terminal aimed at professional DeFi users, featuring high-speed execution, cross-chain trading, and trading privacy.

Genius can help users hide large positions and trading paths through order splitting and multi-wallet collaboration. Users can complete cross-chain transactions in one terminal without frequently switching wallets, bridges, and DEXs.

In January 2026, YZi Labs announced an investment in Genius, calling it a private high-velocity on-chain trading terminal.

YZi Labs mentioned that Genius aims to provide speed, liquidity, and privacy experiences close to centralized exchanges without sacrificing user ownership and decentralization.

💰 Token Performance:

From the secondary market performance, GENIUS has recently shown significant short-term elasticity, with the current price around 0.73 USDT.

SilentSwap: Privacy Infrastructure for Trading Scenarios

X: @SilentSwap | XHunt Ranking: 78144

SilentSwap is a privacy infrastructure aimed at cross-chain trading scenarios, focusing on private cross-chain swaps. It aims to allow users to hide their fund paths and transaction traces when swapping, transferring, and bridging assets across chains.

On public chains, cross-chain transactions often expose a lot of information: where users come from, what assets they exchanged, where the funds ultimately flow, and whether there are connections between different addresses. SilentSwap aims to solve the privacy leakage problem in such cross-chain transactions.

Another feature of SilentSwap is that it does not only emphasize privacy but also places compliance as a product selling point. The official website clearly states OFAC & AML Compliant and claims to have two legal opinions in the United States. This differentiates it from traditional privacy projects that "only emphasize anonymity": it attempts to find a balance between non-custodial, cross-chain privacy, and compliance.

0xBow: Compliance-Friendly Privacy Project

X: @0xbowio | XHunt Ranking: 9376

0xBow is an infrastructure project aimed at on-chain privacy and compliance scenarios, with a core direction of compliant on-chain privacy.

Unlike traditional privacy projects that emphasize "untraceability," 0xBow focuses more on whether users can prove that their funds are not mixed with illegal activities while protecting transaction privacy.

Its core product is Privacy Pools. Privacy Pools support peer-to-peer private transactions while avoiding the mixing of user funds with illegal funds. 0xBow monitors deposits entering Privacy Pools and screens them through a Know Your Transaction mechanism, allowing only qualifying funds to enter the Association Set.

Behind this is 0xBow's Association Set Provider (ASP). The ASP continuously monitors transactions within the Privacy Pools, identifies suspicious patterns, and supports Proof of Association, real-time transaction monitoring, programmable compliance, and modular deployment.

In other words, 0xBow is not simply creating an anonymous pool but is attempting to enable privacy transactions to operate within a compliance framework.

III. Industry Consensus: Privacy is No Longer a "Isolated Narrative"

Aster: Perp DEX Also Begins to Introduce Trading Privacy

Aster itself is a Perp DEX, but its Shield Mode has already integrated privacy into the derivatives trading experience.

This indicates that the demand for privacy no longer exists solely in transfer scenarios. For on-chain traders, what is truly sensitive is often the opening direction, position size, trading path, and funding intentions.

Especially in Perp DEX, if large trades and position changes are exposed in a public environment, they can easily be followed, targeted, or even pre-priced.

Therefore, Aster's Shield Mode is essentially not a traditional privacy coin feature but rather embeds trading privacy into the Perp DEX product. It reflects a more specific trend: for on-chain derivatives to continue to meet more professional trading demands, they may need to address not only liquidity and fees but also the issue of exposing trading intentions.

Vitalik: Ethereum Also Needs Native Privacy

Not only is the application layer beginning to value privacy, but the core route of Ethereum is also starting to revisit this issue.

Recently, Vitalik mentioned the lack of native privacy capabilities in Ethereum and proposed a set of short-term privacy improvement directions, including Account Abstraction, FOCIL, keyed nonces, and Kohaku, among others, for access layer privacy work. These correspond to anti-censorship, transaction untraceability, and privacy protection during wallet and chain reading processes.

This indicates that privacy is no longer just an additional feature of external applications but is also being discussed in the context of wallets, transaction structures, access layers, and protocol design.

EIP-8182: Ethereum is Also Discussing Native Privacy Transfers

EIP-8182 proposes to introduce a standardized private transfer system for Ethereum, allowing ETH and ERC-20 transfers to have native privacy capabilities through shared shielded pools, system contracts, and ZK verification precompiles.

In simple terms, it aims to solve the question: Can private transfers no longer rely on decentralized third-party applications but become a shared infrastructure at the Ethereum protocol layer?

In the past, privacy on Ethereum was often fragmented. Different protocols had different privacy pools, different entry points, and different anonymity sets, resulting in inconsistent user experiences and dispersed privacy effects.

EIP-8182 attempts to push this issue to the protocol layer: If ETH and ERC-20 can share a set of private transfer infrastructure, wallets, applications, and users can more easily access privacy capabilities.

This also indicates that privacy is no longer just the narrative of a few privacy projects. Whether Aster integrates privacy into Perp DEX or EIP-8182 pushes private transfers to the Ethereum protocol layer, they essentially convey the same message:

As the on-chain world matures, privacy is less likely to be a niche feature and more likely to be part of the next phase of infrastructure.

IV. In Conclusion: Finding a Balance Between Transparency and Protection

The privacy sector has returned to the market's view in this round, seemingly as a sector rally. However, if it is only understood as "privacy coins are hot again," it may underestimate the significance of this change. What has truly changed is that the market is beginning to reassess the boundaries of on-chain transparency.

In the past, the crypto industry was accustomed to binding transparency and trust together, believing that as long as all information is public, the system is more trustworthy. But transparency does not mean that all financial behaviors should be exposed without reservation. Users' asset balances, transaction paths, position changes, liquidation prices, and strategic intentions are essentially sensitive information. When this information is fully public, transparency can shift from a trust mechanism to a new source of risk.

Therefore, privacy does not stand in opposition to transparency but answers a more practical question: As on-chain finance continues to expand, which information should be public, and which should be protected? What may be truly important in the future is not who can achieve the most thorough anonymity, but who can find a balance between transparency, privacy, compliance, and usability.

When on-chain finance is still in the small-scale experimental stage, complete transparency may be sufficient. But if it is to support larger funds, more complex transactions, and more professional participants, privacy will no longer be just a niche demand but will become part of the next phase of infrastructure.