Insight: Privacy Track Moves Beyond Niche Field, Potentially Becoming Key Crypto Narrative Direction in 2026

BlockBeats News, January 12th, Crypto Research Institute Stacy Muur shared her view that market data shows privacy-focused crypto assets are transitioning from the fringes to mainstream attention. By 2025, privacy coins as a whole outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum, exhibiting stronger resilience during market fluctuations. At the same time, on-chain real usage continues to rise, with their transaction share increasing from about 9.7% to 11.4%.

Currently, Monero and Zcash still dominate the privacy transaction volume, and the total market value of privacy-focused projects has exceeded 24 billion USD. Meanwhile, several infrastructure teams have begun to rearchitect privacy capabilities as a default layer design of the blockchain, rather than optional features, indicating privacy is becoming a significant part of the underlying architecture.

This trend is more of a long-term strategy than a short-term rotation. Against the backdrop of ongoing global regulation and on-chain monitoring strengthening, the demand for on-chain anonymity and transaction privacy is rising. Privacy coins and related tools are expected to become a key narrative direction in the crypto market in 2026.