Forecasting the Future of Privacy in 2026

The year 2025 marked a significant milestone for on-chain privacy, with Zcash, a pioneering privacy coin, witnessing a more than 600% increase and becoming one of the year's most notable success stories. Major initiatives were announced by Ethereum and Solana to integrate privacy into their networks. Startups focusing on developing privacy-preserving technologies using zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption continued to gain momentum. Influencers such as Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, referred to it as the 'Privacy Season.' 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 forecast what's in store for 2026, we consulted with five leading figures in the privacy space to share their predictions. One prediction is that privacy will become more practical. According to Bobbin Threadbare, co-founder of Miden, the notion that privacy is not binary will gain acceptance in 2026. Neither complete transparency nor absolute privacy is feasible in the real world, as privacy is essential for honest users but can also be exploited by criminals. People will begin to accept the idea of making trade-offs that limit privacy in specific contexts to make protocols more resistant to threats. A potential framework could involve providing conditional privacy for high-risk transactions while maintaining full privacy for low-risk transactions, 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, believes that private stablecoins will emerge as a core component of global payment infrastructure on-chain. There will be increased development of stablecoins that embed configurable privacy by default, including selective disclosure, transaction amount obfuscation, and, in some cases, full sender-receiver anonymity. This growth will be driven by practical payment settlement needs, with enterprises requiring confidentiality to protect sensitive commercial relationships and treasury movements, while retail users will increasingly reject fully transparent payment rails. Furthermore, Paul Brody, EY's global blockchain leader, predicts that 2026 will be the year that privacy starts to get industrialized on-chain. Multiple solutions, from Aztec to Nightfall to Railgun and COTI, are transitioning from testnet to production. However, challenges will arise, as few consumer-facing wallets currently support these capabilities, and the approach to regulatory compliance will likely remain inconsistent. Scale will not be achieved until many of these issues are resolved, but this marks the beginning of a shift from theory to practice. 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 developing pragmatic privacy solutions that help individuals and businesses move on-chain while deterring malicious actors from misusing privacy protocols to launder hacked funds. 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.