2025 was a big year for on-chain privacy. Zcash, one of the original privacy coins, jumped more than 600% and was one of the biggest success stories of the year. Ethereum and Solana announced major initiatives to bring privacy to their networks. And startups building privacy-preserving technology with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) continued to gain traction.
Influencers like Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana’s infrastructure company Helius, said it was “Privacy Szn.” And many others said privacy was critical to institutional adoption, as companies generally don’t want to do business on public blockchains with fully transparent ledgers.
So what’s ahead in 2026? We asked five leading privacy figures to make predictions.
Privacy becomes more practical
Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden
By 2026, it will become clear that privacy is not binary. Neither full transparency nor absolute privacy is useful in the real world, because while privacy is essential to honest users, it can also be used by criminals and other malicious actors to evade law enforcement and harm those same honest users. By 2026, people will begin to accept the notion that we should be willing to make trade-offs that limit privacy in a limited number of contexts in order to make the protocols more threat-resistant (ie, difficult to exploit by criminals and other malicious actors). A good framework here could be to provide conditional privacy for high-risk transactions while providing full confidentiality for low-risk transactions, mimicking to some extent how cash works in the real world.
Year of private stable mints
Khushi Wadhwa, Head of Business Development at Predicate
By 2026, private stablecoins will emerge as a core layer of global payment infrastructure onchain. We will see increased development of stablecoins that integrate configurable privacy as standard, spanning selective disclosure, obfuscation of transaction amounts, and in some cases full sender-receiver anonymity. This growth will be driven by pragmatic payment processing needs. Businesses will demand confidentiality to protect sensitive commercial relationships and financial movements, while retail users will increasingly reject fully transparent payment rails. Importantly, these systems do not exist outside of regulation; instead, they will integrate policy controls that allow compliance without sacrificing basic privacy. The net effect will be a redefinition of what “conforming payments” means onchain, with private stablecoins becoming the preferred medium for both institutional settlement and day-to-day transactions.
Privacy will be industrialized
Paul Brody, EY global blockchain leader
2026 is the year when privacy begins to be industrialized on the chain. More solutions are out there and on their way from testnet to production, from Aztec to Nightfall to Railgun, COTI and others. However, things will become more challenging as few consumer-facing wallets support these options yet, and the regulatory compliance approach will likely be all over the map as well. Scale will not come until many of these issues are resolved, but this is the beginning of a shift from theory to practice.
‘Threat resistance’ will be normal
Wei Dai, 1kx, research partner
Threat-resistant onchain privacy – where blockchains are designed to be nearly impervious to data tampering and unauthorized tampering – will become the widely accepted standard. Instead of focusing on idealistic, theoretical privacy guarantees, more projects will focus on shipping pragmatic privacy solutions that help individuals and businesses move up the chain while deterring malicious actors from abusing privacy protocols to launder hacked funds. Threat-resistant privacy includes two categories of solutions: (1) closed privacy solutions implement deposit delays and limit transfers in the protocol, and (2) responsible privacy solutions that operate without rate limiting, where an information custodian is responsible for tracing the transaction graph in case of malicious hacks.
