The reason cryptocurrencies make everything transparent is simple. If everyone can see all the information, no one can lie and get away with it. A public ledger means exchanges can't falsify reserves, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) can't secretly misappropriate funds, and whales can't pretend they never sold any assets. These are the pain points of traditional markets, and the problems cryptocurrencies aim to solve. It does solve some of these problems. But as Byron Gilliam of Blockworks quoted Kevin Kelly this week, "Most of the problems we face today are caused by our past solutions." Cryptocurrency's solution is complete transparency, but in markets built on anonymous addresses, this solution rarely solves problems completely. This design works for institutions with standardized and audited transactions. But its effectiveness is greatly diminished when it's realized that the same solution would turn every retail investor's financial life into a permanently public stream of information. Cryptocurrencies integrate all our financial scenarios—including receiving payments, trading, donating, and various experiments—into a single, transparent wallet. This tension has become increasingly pronounced in recent months as courts and regulators continue to crack down on privacy infrastructure. On Wednesday, November 19, a U.S. district judge sentenced two co-founders of Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin wallet with built-in mixing tools, to five and four years in prison, respectively. They were found guilty of operating an unlicensed money transfer business and handling more than $237 million in proceeds of crime. In August, a U.S. jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on money laundering and sanctions charges against Roman Storm, founder of cryptocurrency mixer company Tornado Cash. However, the jury found him guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transfer business and sentenced him to a maximum of five years in prison. In Europe, new anti-money laundering regulations will ban the use of privacy coins like Monero and Zcash on EU-regulated platforms from July 1, 2027. This sends a message: anonymous currencies are unwelcome. However, within the market, users are doing the exact opposite. In today's in-depth analysis, I'll explain why this isn't just a wave of "privacy coin hype," but rather a sign that cryptocurrencies are trying to fix their lack of transparency. Now let's get to the point. Public blockchains are built on the assumption that if transparency helps detect fraud, then greater transparency benefits everyone. Under this design, each wallet address breaks down the barriers between your financial identity and others. On the blockchain, your income, your "degen" side of indulging in various Meme coins, long-term investments, and random experiments—all of these are recorded in the same ledger, visible to anyone who can link that address to your real-world identity. Anthropology professor Michael Wesch calls this phenomenon on social media "context collapse," in which family, colleagues, strangers, close friends, and acquaintances are compressed into a single audience. We've all experienced that embarrassing moment: a vacation selfie intended only for a dozen or so people ends up appearing in our boss's social media feed, right? Only on the blockchain, the consequences could be enormous financial losses. Once your address is leaked, there's no going back. All your crypto asset details, activity logs, and risky behavior can be permanently searchable on block explorers. Don't bother figuring out how you got doxxed. It's obvious. Once a blockchain user interacts with a KYC-regulated platform or dApp, their anonymous identity can be linked to a KYC-verified account. Tracking these clues isn't difficult. Recent legal events have heightened user concerns about privacy erosion, prompting them to rely more heavily on protocols that address the issue of transparency in cryptocurrency code. The recent performance of privacy protocols demonstrates that users are actively supporting privacy protection. Despite declining prices on Wall Street and in the cryptocurrency market, funds and users are flowing into the privacy space, including Zcash's growing liquidity pools, private DeFi suites on Railgun, and Starknet's Ztarknet experimental project. This is most evident in Zcash's phoenix-like rebirth. For over seven years, despite its highly academic white paper, Zcash was almost forgotten in the commercial arena. Its approach is solid: protecting transaction security by hiding the sender, receiver, and transaction amount, while ensuring network verification and preventing the creation of tokens out of thin air. It uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs): one party (the prover) can prove to the other party (the verifier) that a statement (in this case, a transaction) is valid without revealing any information beyond its validity. At the time, not many people took it seriously. Now, those numbers have grown dramatically. In the past two months alone, the price of Zcash (ZEC's native token) has increased tenfold, reaching its highest level in over seven years. Approximately 4.9 million ZEC (about 30% of the circulating supply) exist in crypto liquidity pools, a record high and a significant increase from the beginning of the year. What has changed? Abstraction. Back in early 2018, the Zashi wallet's interface wasn't user-friendly. Now, Zashi has addressed this shortcoming. Zashi encapsulates ZEC within a mobile application, providing a unified address and one-click blocking functionality. It also ensures your ZEC isn't locked in a single location. Through integration with NEAR's Intents system, Zashi allows you to treat blocked ZEC as a cross-chain private savings account. NEAR Intents is a cross-link routing tool that simplifies the token transfer process. It transforms the user's question from "How do I get from here to there?" to "This is what I want, and you solve it for me." Users no longer need to painstakingly search for paths through bridges and decentralized exchanges (DEXs); they simply specify the desired outcome, and NEAR's solver network searches the liquidity landscape and returns the best path to execute the user's request. Since its launch in late 2024, NEAR Intents has processed approximately $6.2 billion in transactions, with nearly $9 million in cumulative fees ($11 million) earned in the past two months. When Zashi runs on top of Zcash, your principal balance remains in Zcash's shielded liquidity pool, while NEAR Intents handles the complex cross-chain infrastructure. The target chain only sees the final transaction record. Your other information, including historical transaction logs, other holdings, and activities, remains hidden in this private space. Zcash creates a private foundation layer, while Railgun embeds private collections into Ethereum itself. Railgun's smart contract system uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide balances and transaction paths while maintaining composability. Users can deposit funds into Railgun's shielded liquidity pools and interact privately with DeFi protocols within the pools through exchanges, lending, or providing liquidity, with only deposit and withdrawal information publicly available. As of October, Railgun has processed approximately $4 billion in private transactions since its launch in 2021, with approximately $1.6 billion expected to be contributed in 2025 alone. Railgun delivers the value that Zashi offers to individuals for DAOs and professional trading teams: allowing institutional-grade DeFi strategies to remain completely out of the public eye without leaving Ethereum. Starknet takes this model even further up the stack. It previously experimented with Ztarknet, combining Starknet's ZK proofs with Zcash's vaults. Last month, a proposal on the Zcash community forum outlined a Starknet-style L2 that allows programs to execute off-chain while providing on-chain proofs. Imagine a scenario where all complex activities occur off-chain, Starknet generates a proof that everything has been correctly completed, and Zcash simply verifies the proof and updates the balance. ZEC continues as a currency, Zcash maintains its strong privacy attributes, while Starknet adds speed and programmability on top of that. All these projects—Zashi, NEAR Intents, Railgun, Starknet, and Ztarknet—share the same goal: to meet the market's demand for a world where activity and identity are completely separated, leaving no trace. Of course, none of them are without cost. Technological risks are always present. Each additional layer of intent, rollup, or masking means more potentially flawed code. Vulnerabilities in routers or verification systems can reveal information you thought was hidden, or trap assets in circuits that no one can securely untangle. Furthermore, there are risks related to social and user experience. Cryptocurrencies have been working for years to gamify on-chain activity, rewarding users with airdrops, points, loyalty programs, and "prove you've used X" activities. If more user activity moves to private spaces, the social interaction aspect becomes incomplete. Amid all these changes, how should ordinary users respond? First, ask yourself what harm context collapse will cause, and then decide which contexts need protection. For some, this might mean investment; for others, it might mean the right to trade without permanently tainting their online identity with bad trades. Zcash wallets with viewing keys, intent-based routers, private collections on Ethereum, or rollups that only hide positions and not the market—each addresses a different aspect of the problem and carries its own risks. Cryptocurrencies solve the problem of centralized information control in traditional markets by providing a public ledger. It makes it more difficult to inflate reserves and easier to detect fraud. Furthermore, it consolidates all financial information into a globally searchable stream. The rise of these protocols is precisely to correct this problem. If they maintain this momentum, they will prove that privacy and accountability don't have to be mutually exclusive; you can add doors without tearing down the house.
Kikyo
Weatherly
Catherine
Anais