Looking Ahead to 2026: Expert Predictions for the Future of Privacy

The year 2025 marked significant growth for on-chain privacy, with Zcash experiencing a substantial surge of over 600%. Major initiatives were also announced by Ethereum and Solana to integrate privacy into their networks. Meanwhile, startups focusing on zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption continued to attract attention. Influencers, such as Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, dubbed 2025 the 'Privacy Szn,' highlighting the essential role of privacy in institutional adoption, as companies typically prefer not to conduct business on public blockchains with fully transparent ledgers. To gauge what the future holds, we consulted with five leading figures in the privacy space to share their predictions for 2026. A key prediction is that privacy will become more practical. According to Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden, the notion that privacy is not binary will become more apparent. Neither complete transparency nor absolute privacy is feasible in the real world, as privacy is crucial for honest users but can also be exploited by criminals. In 2026, people will begin to accept the idea of making tradeoffs to limit privacy in specific contexts, making protocols more resistant to threats. 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 that 2026 will be the year of private stablecoins. Khushi Wadhwa, head of business development at Predicate, forecasts that private stablecoins will emerge as a core component of global on-chain payment infrastructure. There will be increased development of stablecoins with default configurable privacy, 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 settlement. Enterprises will require privacy to protect sensitive commercial relationships and treasury movements, while retail users will increasingly reject fully transparent payment systems. These systems will integrate policy controls that enable compliance without compromising baseline privacy, redefining what 'compliant payments' mean on-chain. Private stablecoins are expected to become the preferred medium for both institutional settlement and everyday transactions. Additionally, Paul Brody, EY's global blockchain leader, predicts that 2026 is the year privacy will start to get industrialized on-chain. Multiple solutions, such as Aztec, Nightfall, and Railgun, are moving from testnet to production. However, the lack of support from consumer-facing wallets and inconsistent approaches to regulatory compliance may pose challenges. Despite these hurdles, this marks the beginning of a shift from theoretical to practical applications of privacy solutions. Lastly, Wei Dai, Research Partner at 1kx, forecasts that threat-resistant on-chain privacy will become the widely accepted standard. Instead of focusing on idealistic, theoretical privacy guarantees, more projects will prioritize shipping pragmatic privacy solutions that help individuals and businesses transition to on-chain transactions while deterring malicious actors from exploiting privacy protocols. Threat-resistant privacy encompasses two categories of solutions: throttled privacy solutions, which implement deposit delays and limit in-protocol transfers, and responsible privacy solutions, which operate without velocity limits and rely on an information custodian to trace the transaction graph in the event of any malicious hacks.