Written by: Haotian
Let's talk about why the privacy sector will be the core narrative of crypto in 2026. Besides $ZEC, I recommend paying attention to the potential performance opportunities of @zama, @boundless_xyz, and @anoma:
1) First, let's discuss a core driving logic: the privacy sector has evolved from being suppressed by regulation to becoming a necessity for compliance.
For the past decade, blockchain privacy has been a false proposition because the technical path was wrong. Most projects pursued privacy for the sake of privacy, implementing indiscriminate anonymity while ignoring compliance boundaries and the feasibility of business expansion, which led to continuous regulatory crackdowns. The ongoing sanctions against @TornadoCash are a typical case.
2) However, in 2025-2026, the situation is different. The strong performance of $ZEC in the secondary market is the most obvious signal. As a long-established leader in privacy, @Zcash has validated over ten years, along with Naval's endorsement, that privacy is not a false demand, but rather a matter of timing. This is because the core technical path has changed.
This generation of privacy projects is focused on "programmable compliance," which protects user privacy while leaving a backdoor for regulators. This aligns perfectly with the underlying architecture required for the institutional-led Crypto era, such as RWA asset tokenization and transaction agentification.
3) Therefore, the explosion of the privacy sector is no longer a past speculative concept but an inevitable result of industry evolution. Following this line of thought, let's look at the strategic positioning of the three projects below:
- @zama (FHE) - This is a revolutionary infrastructure for privacy technology at the most fundamental level. The core understanding is the essential difference between FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) and ZK. The ZK used by Zcash can only prove "I know the secret," but FHE can directly process data in an encrypted state. For example, Zcash can hide transaction amounts, but FHE allows the entire DeFi protocol's collateral, lending, and liquidation processes to run in ciphertext, with nodes completely unaware of what is being computed.
Zama does not create a new chain but builds a Privacy Layer for all EVM chains, akin to "HTTPS for blockchains." Through fhEVM, Zama enables mainstream chains like Ethereum, Base, and Solana to gain privacy computing capabilities, opening up possibilities for scalable commercial applications. Once it secures this role, it becomes the "shovel seller" of the entire Crypto industry.
The key is that Zama is working with Fabric Cryptography on FPGA acceleration cards. Once implemented, the TPS of FHE could increase by 10-100 times, and gas costs could drop by two orders of magnitude. At that point, it may shed the "toy" label of FHE cryptography and move towards consumer-grade applications.
- @anoma (Intent-centric) - This is positioned as a web3 intent operating system aimed at reconstructing the transaction paradigm. Traditional DeFi users' transactions typically run naked in the Mempool, with intentions fully exposed to MEV bots. Anoma focuses on privacy in counterparty discovery, allowing users to publish encrypted intentions, with Solvers facilitating transactions without decryption (in conjunction with FHE or TEE).
It is evident that this solution addresses privacy issues at a basic level; it also tackles the problems of multi-chain fragmentation and interaction complexity.
- @boundless_xyz (zkVM) - This is the infrastructure for the marketization of ZK computing power, addressing the "general privacy proof" issue, which has been severely underestimated in the privacy sector. Boundless is incubated by @RiscZero, turning ZK proof generation into a tradable computing power commodity, modularly embedded into any scenario requiring ZK verification.
In the future, after the massive explosion of demand for ZK-Rollup and ZK Coprocessors, Boundless will be the decentralized carrier generating vast amounts of ZK proofs. Boundless opens up infinite possibilities for privacy applications: on-chain identity, on-chain credit, on-chain compliance, and strategy proofs for AI agents can all achieve privacy protection using zkVM.
That's all.
Rationally deducing, the growth and strengthening of the privacy sector cannot rely solely on Zcash to hold up the sky. If $ZEC is a super narrative engine for the privacy sector, then Zama builds the encryption computing layer, Anoma builds the intent matching layer, and Boundless builds the general proof layer, forming a complete technical stack that supports the flourishing narrative of the privacy sector, with none being dispensable.
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