In the fourth quarter of 2025, when the market was generally sluggish, a group of "old faces" unexpectedly became the new focus in the cryptocurrency space. Data shows that 11 established projects, including Zcash, Dash, ICP, and Filecoin, saw an average increase of up to 55.3% over the past 30 days. These projects had long been marginalized in the previous round of bull-bear cycles, their narratives exhausted, yet now they are collectively "sprouting new buds" amid tightening liquidity, sparking heated discussions in the market.
Is this "comeback" of old projects merely a short-term capital flight to safety, or is it a structural signal of the industry shifting from "hype for new" to "revaluation"?
The first to ignite was the privacy sector.
ZEC became the "fuse" for this wave of market activity—surging 151% in the past month, reaching a new high since 2018. Although it is still about 80% below its historical peak, investor interest is rapidly returning. The market's momentum comes from two forces: one is the public endorsements from opinion leaders, including BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes and Silicon Valley investor Naval; the other is ZEC's substantial actions on the technical and ecological fronts. The development team of Zcash, ECC, proposed performance upgrades for the privacy wallet Zashi in their fourth-quarter roadmap and enhanced the transparency of foundation governance; additionally, the restart of Grayscale Trust subscriptions has become an important catalyst for price recovery. More critically, the block reward halving in 2024 drastically reduces new supply, reinforcing the logic of scarcity. Correspondingly, XMR also saw a rise. In an environment where privacy demand is resurging, XMR's price increased by 43.6% over the past 30 days, reaching a new high since 2021. Monero's recent Fluorine Fermi upgrade strengthened its defenses against "spy nodes," and the community governance system CCS is also steadily advancing. Compared to emerging privacy narrative projects, these old coins have the advantage of a long-validated tech stack, a still-engaged community, and a more stable decentralized structure.
The "revival" of privacy assets is both a natural response of the market to the high-pressure regulatory environment on anonymity and possibly a funding strategy—when mainstream asset volatility slows and speculative enthusiasm finds no outlet, capital often flows back to "old narratives" that are saturated in sentiment and have smaller circulating supplies.
Unlike privacy coins, another group of projects has completed "self-revaluation" by binding themselves to emerging narratives.
CIP is the most representative case. Leveraging the explosion of AI concepts, ICP rose 111% in 30 days, becoming one of the best-performing old projects this year. The driving force behind this is the DeAI platform Caffeine launched by the DFINITY Foundation, which allows users to create and deploy Web3 applications through natural language, lowering development barriers and providing a practical path for the "AI + chain" concept.
FIL also chose a similar narrative shift. It increased by 51.5% in the past month, with the core logic transitioning from decentralized storage to "on-chain cloud services." After the release of the v26 network upgrade, Filecoin's gas fees dropped by nearly half; the ecological fund injected capital into over 200 projects through RetroPGF; its newly launched Filecoin Pin and Akave Cloud's enterprise-level decentralized storage solution gradually positioned it to compete with traditional cloud services. AR also benefited from AI data demand and the DePIN craze, rising 31.7% in a month.
It can be said that this wave of "old coins reborn" is not supported by speculation but finds new value anchors through technological reconstruction. New trends like AI, ZK, and DePIN have not created new assets but have provided "re-narration" space for old assets. The existing resources and brand accumulation of old projects make them more likely to attract market attention and tentative capital inflows than new projects.
In addition to single coin increases, some projects are reshaping their long-term competitiveness through governance and economic model reforms.
Uniswap proposed the "UNIfication Proposal" in November, which includes three major topics: activating protocol fees, a burn mechanism, and a growth budget, leading to a 43% increase in UNI's price. Although it is still about 80% below its historical peak, this proposal is seen as a signal of restructuring in the DeFi market—from "liquidity competition" to "ecological profit redistribution."
Similarly, NEAR Protocol is promoting the integration of cross-chain transactions and AI-friendly features by launching the House of Stake mainnet and the Near Intents execution framework. It has seen an increase of about 20% in the past month; although the increase is not large, it demonstrates its strategic extension in the direction of "AI and multi-chain integration."
Notably, NEAR is collaborating with Nasdaq-listed company OceanPal to build a NEAR-based crypto treasury and confidential AI cloud platform. This "on-chain enterprise-level cooperation" model provides new capital injections and RWA landing channels for established public chains.
In the ZK track, Starknet and ZKsync have gained short-term attention through ZK technology iterations. Starknet launched the S-two proof system, went live with Circle's native USDC, and introduced CCTP V2; ZKsync updated the Atlas version of ZK Stack and introduced a buyback and burn mechanism, making the token model more sustainable.
The commonality of these upgrades and governance actions is that they no longer simply pursue traffic or "narrative heat," but focus on "structural stability" and "revenue closure." This shift in underlying thinking is an important signal of the maturation of the crypto industry.
The collective rise of old projects against the trend is not just driven by sentiment. The deeper reason is that the market is shifting from "telling stories" to "looking at cash flow."
When new narratives frequently change and capital is dispersed among meme coins and short-term speculation, projects with a real operational history, stable nodes, and governance structures become the new safe havens.
Although these old projects are still far from their historical peaks, their risk structures are more transparent, governance mechanisms more mature, and they are more likely to "survive" during periods of capital contraction.
From the perspective of capital flow, institutional risk appetite in the secondary market has clearly decreased. Some investment banks and quantitative funds have begun to reallocate "undervalued, high liquidity" old coin assets as a stable part of their portfolios. In other words, the rise of old projects is a form of "capital defensive rotation" and a process of the market re-pricing "certainty."
This counter-trend market may not be able to continuously create short-term wealth myths, but it marks a long-term trend: the crypto market is evolving from a speculation-dominated game to a verifiable, reusable, and sustainable structural ecosystem.
As capital gradually grows weary of the "story cycle," what can truly survive through cycles are not the latest tokens, but those old projects that can continuously correct themselves and find new narrative pivot points.
In an era of "narrative surplus and trust scarcity" in crypto, the counter-trend rise of old projects like ZEC, ICP, FIL, and UNI may not be the prologue to a return to highs, but rather a prelude to the industry's return to rationality.
When technological innovation, governance structures, and capital logic realign, the meaning of cycles may no longer be about price peaks and troughs, but rather signals of structural repair and maturity.
The projects that truly traverse cycles may not be the "fastest," but the "most stable."
Related: Privacy coins are not radical; what is truly radical is surveillance currency.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
