2025 was a big year for on-chain privacy. Zcash, one of the original privacy coins, jumped over 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 creating privacy-preserving technology with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) continued to gain traction.
Influencers like Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure company Helius, said it was “Privacy Szn.” And many others said privacy was essential for institutional adoption, as companies generally don’t want to do business on public blockchains with fully transparent ledgers.
So what does the future hold for 2026? We asked five prominent people in the privacy space to make predictions.
Privacy will be more practical
Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden
In 2026, it will be clear that privacy is not binary. Neither complete transparency nor absolute privacy is viable in the real world because, while privacy is essential for honest users, it can also be used by criminals and other nefarious actors to evade law enforcement and harm honest users themselves. In 2026, people will begin to accept the notion that we should be willing to make tradeoffs that reduce privacy in a limited number of contexts to make protocols more resistant to threats (i.e., difficult to exploit by criminals and other nefarious actors). A good framework here might be to provide conditional privacy for high-risk transactions, while also providing full privacy for low-risk transactions, mimicking, to some extent, how cash works in the real world.
The year of private stablecoins
Khushi Wadhwa, Head of Business Development at Predicate
In 2026, private stablecoins will emerge as a core layer of the global on-chain payments infrastructure. We will see further development of stablecoins that incorporate configurable privacy by default, encompassing selective disclosure, transaction amount obfuscation, and in some cases, complete sender-receiver anonymity. This growth will be driven by pragmatic payment settlement needs. Businesses will require confidentiality to protect sensitive business relationships and cash flows, while retail users will increasingly reject fully transparent payment methods. Importantly, these systems will not exist outside of regulation; instead, they will integrate policy controls that enable compliance without sacrificing basic privacy. The net effect will be a redefinition of what “compliant payments” mean on-chain, with private stablecoins becoming the preferred medium for both institutional settlement and everyday transactions.
Privacy will be industrialized
Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader
2026 is the year privacy begins to be industrialized up the chain. There are multiple solutions moving from testnet to production, from Aztec to Nightfall, Railgun, COTI and others. However, things will become more challenging as few consumer-facing wallets support these capabilities yet and the focus on regulatory compliance will likely remain 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 on-chain privacy, where blockchains are designed to be nearly immune to data tampering and unauthorized tampering, will become the widely accepted default. Instead of focusing on theoretical and idealistic privacy guarantees, more projects will focus on offering pragmatic privacy solutions that help people and companies move up the chain while deterring malicious actors from misusing privacy protocols to launder hacked funds. Threat-resistant privacy includes two categories of solutions: (1) limited privacy solutions implement delays in deposits and limit transfers within the protocol, and (2) responsible privacy solutions that operate without rate limits, where an information custodian is responsible for tracking the transaction graph in case of malicious attacks.
