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

The year 2025 marked significant growth for on-chain privacy, with Zcash, a pioneering privacy coin, experiencing a substantial surge of over 600%. Additionally, major players like Ethereum and Solana announced initiatives to integrate privacy into their networks. Startups focusing on zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption also gained momentum. Influencers, including Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, emphasized the importance of privacy, dubbing it 'Privacy Szn.' Many experts believe that privacy is crucial 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 gather their predictions. 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 viable in the real world, as privacy is essential for honest users but can also be exploited by criminals. In 2026, people will begin to accept the idea of making trade-offs that limit privacy in specific contexts to make 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. These stablecoins will embed configurable privacy by default, including features like selective disclosure, transaction amount obfuscation, and 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. Importantly, these systems will not operate outside of regulation but will instead integrate policy controls that allow for compliance without compromising baseline privacy. As a result, the concept of 'compliant payments' on-chain will be redefined, with private stablecoins becoming the preferred medium for both institutional settlement and everyday transactions. 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 transitioning from testnet to production. However, challenges remain, including the lack of support from consumer-facing wallets and inconsistent approaches to regulatory compliance. Scale will be achieved once these issues are addressed, marking the beginning of a shift from theoretical to practical applications. 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 operations while deterring malicious actors from misusing privacy protocols. Threat-resistant privacy encompasses two categories of solutions: throttled privacy solutions that 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 any malicious hacks.