Forecasting the Future of Privacy: 4 Key Predictions for 2026

The year 2025 marked significant growth for on-chain privacy, with Zcash, a pioneering privacy coin, experiencing a substantial surge of over 600%. Major blockchain networks such as Ethereum and Solana also announced significant initiatives aimed at integrating privacy features. Startups focused on developing zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technologies continued to gain momentum. Industry influencers, including Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, highlighted the importance of privacy, dubbing it '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 gain insight into what 2026 holds for the privacy space, we consulted with five leading figures in the field to gather 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 become more widely accepted. 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. 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. 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, forecasts that private stablecoins will emerge as a core component of global on-chain payment infrastructure. The development of stablecoins with embedded, configurable privacy by default will increase, featuring 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, and retail users increasingly rejecting fully transparent payment rails. These systems will integrate policy controls that enable compliance without compromising baseline privacy, redefining what 'compliant payments' mean on-chain and making private stablecoins the preferred medium for both institutional settlement and everyday transactions. A third prediction suggests that privacy will be industrialized. Paul Brody, EY's global blockchain leader, believes that 2026 is the year privacy starts to get industrialized on-chain, with multiple solutions transitioning from testnet to production, including Aztec, Nightfall, Railgun, and COTI. However, challenges will arise, as few consumer-facing wallets currently support these capabilities, and regulatory compliance approaches will likely remain inconsistent. Scale will not be achieved until these issues are resolved, but this marks the beginning of a shift from theory to practice. Lastly, 'threat-resistance' is predicted to become the norm. Wei Dai, Research Partner at 1kx, forecasts that threat-resistant on-chain privacy, where blockchains are designed to be highly resistant to data tampering and unauthorized access, 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 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 malicious hacks.