BlockBeats News, January 12th, Crypto Research Institute Stacy Muur shared her view that market data shows privacy-focused crypto assets are transitioning from the fringes to mainstream attention. By 2025, privacy coins as a whole outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum, exhibiting stronger resilience during market fluctuations. At the same time, on-chain real usage continues to rise, with their transaction share increasing from about 9.7% to 11.4%.
Currently, Monero and Zcash still dominate the privacy transaction volume, and the total market value of privacy-focused projects has exceeded 24 billion USD. Meanwhile, several infrastructure teams have begun to rearchitect privacy capabilities as a default layer design of the blockchain, rather than optional features, indicating privacy is becoming a significant part of the underlying architecture.
This trend is more of a long-term strategy than a short-term rotation. Against the backdrop of ongoing global regulation and on-chain monitoring strengthening, the demand for on-chain anonymity and transaction privacy is rising. Privacy coins and related tools are expected to become a key narrative direction in the crypto market in 2026.
