A back-to-roots trade is emerging as market participants wake up to the privacy corners of the crypto ecosystem, returning attention to what dominated much of the 2017-18 market bull cycle.
Tokens in the sector are up 15% on average in the last 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows. is up more than 40%, bringing seven gains to over 85% in a streak that has made it the best-performing large-cap token on the market.
The performance of the ZEC is accompanied by rebounds in , , and which have increased from 13 to 35% in the last 24 hours. Privacy smart contract system Railgun’s RAIL token is up more than 117%, with one-week gains of more than 300%. Volumes are increasing across the board, with ZEC alone turning over over $1.1 billion in spot volumes in the last day across all exchanges.
What stands out is how capital is rotating into the once-forgotten privacy sector at the exact moment when broader liquidity is searching for a new narrative and big companies are taking a breather. Bitcoin is cooling just below $122,000, ether is trading at $4,350 and major currencies are holding steady after hitting new highs earlier in the week.
Technology-driven price increases
The mechanics are simple. Monero’s XMR is still the default privacy play, but the huge gains are coming from tokens with catalysts. Monero developers released the ‘Fluorine Fermi’ update to improve user privacy against spy nodes early Friday.
Railgun’s rise reflects renewed focus on its smart contract-based secured transactions, while Zcash’s rally has been supported by integrations through Zashi, its mobile wallet that now supports cross-chain swaps on secured ZEC.
Dash, long dismissed as a relic, suddenly jumped as merchants overhauled its payments brand at a time when stablecoin regulation is back in the conversation.
The flows suggest a positioning for a longer regulation arc. With ETF allocations driving bitcoin higher, altcoin offerings have followed narratives: AI, memes, infrastructure and now privacy.
The fact that privacy tokens are showing multi-day strength suggests that this is not just a one-time pump.
In previous bull markets, privacy tokens soared when surveillance or compliance dominated the headlines. The current situation seems similar: the US government shutdown has stalled economic data, central banks are becoming more dovish, and debates over financial censorship are back in the news.
That backdrop makes it easier for privacy operations to fit into bitcoin’s coverage narrative.
