Forecasting the Future of Privacy in 2026

The year 2025 marked significant milestones for on-chain privacy, with Zcash, a pioneering privacy coin, experiencing a substantial surge of over 600%. Major players like Ethereum and Solana also unveiled initiatives aimed at integrating privacy into their networks. Moreover, startups focusing on privacy-preserving technologies, including zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption, gained considerable traction. Influencers, such as Mert Mumtaz, emphasized the importance of privacy, dubbing it 'Privacy Szn,' and highlighting its necessity for institutional adoption, given that companies typically prefer not to conduct business on public blockchains with transparent ledgers. To gauge what 2026 holds, we consulted with five leading figures in the privacy space for their predictions. A key prediction is that privacy will become more practical. According to Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden, the binary approach to privacy will evolve, recognizing that absolute privacy and full transparency are not feasible in the real world. Instead, there will be a shift towards making tradeoffs that limit privacy in specific contexts to enhance threat resistance. This could involve providing conditional privacy for high-risk transactions while maintaining full privacy for low-risk ones, similar to how cash operates in the real world. Another prediction is the emergence of private stablecoins as a core component of global on-chain payment infrastructure. Khushi Wadhwa, head of business development at Predicate, forecasts that private stablecoins will become prevalent, offering configurable privacy features such as selective disclosure and transaction amount obfuscation. This growth will be driven by the need for confidentiality in payment settlements, both for enterprises protecting commercial relationships and for retail users seeking privacy. Importantly, these systems will integrate policy controls to ensure compliance without compromising baseline privacy. Paul Brody, EY's global blockchain leader, predicts that 2026 will be the year privacy becomes industrialized on-chain, with multiple solutions transitioning from testnet to production. However, challenges such as regulatory compliance and the lack of support from consumer-facing wallets will need to be addressed before scale can be achieved. Lastly, Wei Dai, Research Partner at 1kx, anticipates that threat-resistant on-chain privacy will become the norm, where blockchains are designed to be highly resistant to data tampering and unauthorized access. Instead of focusing on theoretical privacy guarantees, projects will prioritize pragmatic solutions that facilitate the adoption of on-chain transactions while deterring malicious actors. Threat-resistant privacy solutions include throttled privacy, which implements deposit delays and limits in-protocol transfers, and responsible privacy, which operates without velocity limits and relies on an information custodian to trace transaction graphs in the event of malicious hacks.