Four Key Predictions for 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%. This growth was complemented by announcements from Ethereum and Solana regarding major initiatives aimed at integrating privacy into their networks. Startups focused on developing privacy-preserving technologies, including zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), continued to attract attention and investment. Influencers such as Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, highlighted the importance of privacy, referring to 2025 as 'Privacy Szn.' Many experts emphasized that privacy is crucial for institutional adoption, as companies typically prefer not to conduct business on public blockchains with fully transparent ledgers. To gauge the future of privacy in 2026, we solicited predictions from five leading figures in the privacy space. The consensus points towards a more practical approach to privacy, recognizing that absolute privacy and full transparency are not viable in the real world. Instead, there will be a shift towards making tradeoffs that limit privacy in specific contexts to enhance threat resistance. A potential framework could involve providing conditional privacy for high-risk transactions while maintaining full privacy for low-risk ones, mirroring the functionality of cash in the real world. The emergence of private stablecoins is also anticipated, with these coins embedding configurable privacy by default. This development will be driven by the need for confidential payment settlements, both for enterprises seeking to protect sensitive commercial relationships and for retail users who are increasingly rejecting fully transparent payment systems. Importantly, these private stablecoins will integrate policy controls that allow for compliance without compromising baseline privacy, potentially redefining what 'compliant payments' mean on-chain. Furthermore, 2026 is expected to be the year when privacy solutions start to get industrialized, with multiple projects transitioning from testnet to production. However, challenges such as the lack of support from consumer-facing wallets and varied approaches to regulatory compliance may hinder scale. The concept of 'threat-resistance' is also predicted to become the norm, 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 facilitate the on-chain transition for individuals and businesses while deterring malicious actors. Threat-resistant privacy solutions will include both throttled privacy solutions, which implement deposit delays and limit in-protocol transfers, and responsible privacy solutions that operate without velocity limits, where an information custodian is responsible for tracing the transaction graph in the event of malicious hacks.