Forecasting the Future of Privacy: 4 Key Predictions for 2026

The year 2025 marked significant growth for on-chain privacy, with Zcash, a pioneering privacy coin, experiencing a substantial surge of over 600%. Major initiatives were also announced by Ethereum and Solana to integrate privacy into their networks. Furthermore, startups focused on developing privacy-preserving technologies using zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption gained considerable traction. Influencers such as Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, dubbed it the 'Privacy Season,' emphasizing the essential role of privacy in facilitating institutional adoption, as companies typically prefer not to conduct business on public blockchains with fully transparent ledgers. To gauge what's in store for 2026, we consulted with five leading figures in the privacy space to share their predictions. A key anticipation is that privacy will become more practical. According to Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden, 2026 will usher in an understanding that privacy is not a binary concept. Neither complete transparency nor absolute privacy is viable in the real world, as while privacy is crucial for honest users, it can also be exploited by criminals. Thus, there will be a shift towards accepting trade-offs 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 functions in the real world. Another prediction is the emergence of private stablecoins as a fundamental layer of global on-chain payment infrastructure. Khushi Wadhwa, head of business development at Predicate, forecasts that private stablecoins will gain prominence, featuring configurable privacy by default, including selective disclosure, transaction amount obfuscation, and in some cases, full sender-receiver anonymity. This growth will be driven by the need for confidential payment settlements, with enterprises requiring privacy to protect sensitive commercial relationships and treasury movements, and retail users increasingly rejecting fully transparent payment systems. Importantly, these systems will operate within regulatory frameworks, integrating policy controls that allow compliance without compromising baseline privacy. This will redefine 'compliant payments' on-chain, with private stablecoins becoming the preferred medium for both institutional and everyday transactions. 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 the lack of support from consumer-facing wallets and varied approaches to regulatory compliance 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 standard, where blockchains are designed to be highly resistant to data tampering and unauthorized access. Instead of focusing on idealistic privacy guarantees, projects will prioritize pragmatic privacy solutions that help individuals and businesses transition to on-chain operations while deterring malicious actors from exploiting privacy protocols for illicit activities.