2025 was a big year for online privacy. Zcash, one of the first hot coins, surged over 600% and was one of the biggest success stories of the year. Ethereum and Solana have announced major initiatives to ensure the privacy of their networks. And startups developing privacy-preserving technologies with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) have continued to gain traction.
Influencers like Mert Mumtaz, CEO of infrastructure company Solana Helius, said it was “Privacy Szn”. And many others have said privacy is key to institutional adoption because companies generally don’t want to do business on public blockchains with fully transparent ledgers.
So, what does he have in store for 2026? We asked five leading figures in the privacy field to make their predictions.
Privacy will become more practical
Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden
By 2026, it will become clear that privacy is not binary. Neither complete transparency nor absolute privacy is achievable 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 the same honest users. In 2026, people will begin to accept the idea that we should be willing to make tradeoffs that restrict privacy in a limited number of contexts in order to make protocols more resilient to threats (i.e., difficult to exploit by criminals and other nefarious actors). A good framework might be to provide conditional privacy for high-risk transactions, while 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
By 2026, private stablecoins will become an essential layer of the global on-chain payment infrastructure. We will see increased development of stablecoins that incorporate configurable privacy by default, covering selective disclosure, obfuscation of the transaction amount, and in some cases, complete anonymity of the sender and recipient. This growth will be driven by pragmatic payment settlement needs. Businesses will need privacy to protect sensitive business relationships and cash movements, while retail users will increasingly reject fully transparent payment channels. It is important to note that these systems will not exist outside of regulation; instead, they will incorporate policy controls that enable compliance without sacrificing basic privacy. The net effect will be a redefinition of what “compliant payments” means on-chain, with private stablecoins becoming the preferred medium for both institutional settlement and everyday transactions.
Confidentiality will be industrialized
Paul Brody, global blockchain leader at EY
2026 is the year when privacy begins to become industrialized on-chain. Several solutions exist and move from testnet to production, from Aztec to Nightfall via Railgun, COTI and others. Things will get more difficult, however, as few consumer-facing wallets yet support these capabilities and the approach to regulatory compliance will likely be ubiquitous as well. Scale won’t be achieved until many of these issues are resolved, but this is the start of a move 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 impervious to data tampering and unauthorized tampering – will become the widely accepted default. Instead of focusing on idealistic and theoretical privacy guarantees, more projects will focus on providing pragmatic privacy solutions that help individuals and businesses move on-chain while deterring bad actors from misusing privacy protocols to launder hacked funds. Threat-resistant privacy includes two categories of solutions: (1) bounded privacy solutions implement escrow deadlines and limit transfers in the protocol, and (2) responsible privacy solutions that operate without speed limits, where an information custodian is responsible for tracing the transaction graph in the event of a malicious hack.
