Forecasting the Future of Privacy: 4 Key Predictions for 2026

The year 2025 marked significant milestones for on-chain privacy, with Zcash, one of the pioneering privacy coins, experiencing a substantial surge of over 600%. Major players like Ethereum and Solana also announced significant initiatives to integrate privacy into their networks. Meanwhile, startups focused on developing privacy-preserving technologies, including zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption, continued to gain momentum. Influencers such as Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, dubbed 2025 the 'Privacy Szn,' emphasizing the importance of privacy for 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 prediction is that privacy will become more practical. According to Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden, 2026 will see a shift towards recognizing that privacy is not binary, and that a balanced approach, making tradeoffs to limit privacy in specific contexts to enhance threat resistance, will become more accepted. This might 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 core component of global on-chain payment infrastructure. Khushi Wadhwa, head of business development at Predicate, forecasts that private stablecoins will develop with embedded configurable privacy, including selective disclosure and transaction amount obfuscation, driven by the need for confidential payment settlements. These systems will integrate policy controls for compliance without compromising baseline privacy, potentially redefining 'compliant payments' on-chain. 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 wallet support will need to be addressed for scale. Lastly, Wei Dai, Research Partner at 1kx, anticipates that threat-resistant on-chain privacy, where blockchains are designed to be highly resistant to data tampering, will become the standard. This shift will focus on pragmatic privacy solutions that deter malicious actors while enabling individuals and businesses to operate on-chain, including throttled and responsible privacy solutions.