Why will the privacy track be the core narrative of crypto in 2026?

Author: Haotian

Why do you think the privacy track will be the core narrative of crypto in 2026?

Besides $ZEC , it’s recommended to pay attention to the potential performance opportunities of @zama, @boundless_xyz, and @anoma:

1. First, let’s discuss the core driving logic: the privacy track has evolved from being suppressed and constrained by regulations in the past to becoming a necessity for compliance. Over the past decade, blockchain privacy has been a pseudo-issue because the technical approach was wrong. Most projects focused on privacy for privacy’s sake, implementing indiscriminate anonymity, ignoring regulatory boundaries and commercial feasibility, which led to continuous regulatory crackdowns. The ongoing sanctions against @TornadoCash@ are a typical example.

2. However, in 2025-2026, the situation is quite different. The strong performance of $ZEC in the secondary market is the most obvious signal. As a veteran leader in privacy, @Zcash@ has validated over ten years with a rally led by Naval that privacy is not a pseudo-need, but just a matter of timing. The core technical approach has changed. The privacy projects of this generation are all working on “programmable compliance”: protecting user privacy while leaving backdoors for regulators. This perfectly aligns with the infrastructure needs of the Crypto era driven by institutional assets like RWA tokenization and trading agents.

3. Therefore, the explosion of the privacy track is no longer just hype but an inevitable result of industry evolution. Following this logic, let’s look at the strategic positioning of the following three projects:

1. @zama (FHE), this is the foundational infrastructure revolution for privacy technology. It’s crucial to understand the fundamental difference between FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) and ZK (Zero-Knowledge). Zcash uses ZK to prove “I know the secret,” but FHE can process data directly in encrypted form. For example, Zcash can hide transfer amounts, but FHE allows entire DeFi protocols—collateralization, lending, liquidation—to operate in ciphertext, with nodes unaware of what’s being computed.

Zama doesn’t build a new chain but provides a Privacy Layer for all EVM-compatible chains, similar to “HTTPS for blockchain.” Through fhEVM, Zama enables mainstream chains like Ethereum, Base, Solana to gain privacy computing capabilities, opening the door to scalable commercial applications. Once positioned in this role, it becomes the “selling shovels” role for the entire crypto industry.

The key point is that Zama is collaborating with Fabric Cryptography to develop FPGA acceleration cards. Once implemented, FHE’s TPS can increase by 10-100 times, and gas costs can drop by two orders of magnitude. This could shed the “toy” label from FHE cryptography and move toward mass-market consumer applications.

2. @anoma (Intent-centric), this is positioned as a Web3 intent operation system aiming to reconstruct transaction paradigms. Traditional DeFi users’ transactions are often exposed in the mempool, revealing intent to MEV bots. Anoma focuses on privacy for transaction counterparties, where users publish encrypted intents, and a solver matches transactions without decrypting them, combining ( with FHE or TEE). It’s clear that this scheme’s privacy solution is just an entry point; it also addresses multi-chain fragmentation and interaction complexity.

3. @boundless_xyz (zkVM), this is the foundational infrastructure for ZK computing marketization, addressing the “general-purpose privacy proof” problem, which has been seriously underestimated in the privacy track. Boundless, incubated by @RiscZero@, has made ZK proof generation programmable into tradable compute commodities, modularly embedded into any scene requiring ZK verification.

In the future, with the large-scale demand for ZK-Rollups and ZK coprocessors, Boundless will be the decentralized platform generating massive amounts of ZK proofs. Boundless unlocks infinite possibilities for privacy applications: on-chain identity, on-chain credit, on-chain compliance, AI agent strategy proofs—all can be achieved with zkVM.

That’s all.

Rationally speaking, the growth and strength of the privacy track cannot rely solely on Zcash. If $ZEC is a super narrative engine for the privacy track, then Zama’s encryption layer, Anoma’s intent matching layer, and Boundless’s general proof layer form a complete technical stack supporting the thriving privacy narrative—each indispensable.