Eleven months after bitcoin set an all-time high of just over $126,000 in October 2025, most cryptocurrencies remain well below their peak valuations. Bitcoin itself is down considerably, as are DeFi and gaming tokens. One sector, however, is up — and by a large margin.
Glassnode’s basket of privacy coins has more than tripled since the bitcoin peak, according to data the analytics firm published on 7 September 2026, gaining 90 percent over the past month alone. The sector’s combined market value has grown from $7.1 billion a year ago to $33.6 billion. Of the 25 largest crypto assets, only four trade above their 6 October price: Zcash, Hyperliquid’s HYPE, Monero and WhiteBIT’s WBT.
Two of the four are privacy coins.
The move has an obvious leader. Zcash accounts for over 60 percent of the sector’s capitalisation and has risen more than 25-fold over the past year, climbing from 82nd place by market value to 10th largest crypto asset overall by market capitalisation. But the rally is not a single-token event. Strip ZEC out and the remaining privacy basket is still up 85 percent on the year.
Zcash Gets a Wrapper
The catalyst for the latest leg is a product, not a protocol change. On 25 August, Grayscale’s Zcash Trust, a vehicle that began life as a private placement in October 2017, began trading on NYSE Arca as the Zcash ETF, ticker ZCSH. Grayscale calls it the first exchange-traded product anywhere to offer spot exposure to ZEC. The Block reported net inflows of more than $34 million in the fund’s first two weeks, with $12.6 million arriving on 2 September alone. Two days later ZEC traded through $1,000 for the first time since the brief price discovery that followed its 2016 launch, touching $1,023.
Zcash’s design explains why a US-listed wrapper was possible at all. Users can transact on a transparent ledger or move funds into a shielded pool, where zero-knowledge proofs hide sender, recipient and amount. Holders can also hand a viewing key to an auditor, counterparty or tax authority, disclosing their own transaction history without publishing it to everyone. Grayscale’s launch announcement leans on that feature, describing selective disclosure as compatible with compliance obligations. The shielded pool has grown alongside the price: close to 30 percent of circulating ZEC now sits in shielded addresses, up from about 8 percent in early 2024, largely because newer wallets default to shielded transactions.
Institutional positioning preceded the ETF. On 6 May 2026, Tushar Jain, co-founder and managing partner of Multicoin Capital, said on X that the fund had built a significant ZEC position since February, calling the asset “the cleanest way to express this thesis in public markets”, the thesis being demand for “truly private, censorship-resistant and seizure-resistant assets”. ZEC rose more than 30 percent on the day.
Monero Sans Exchanges
Monero (XMR) has taken the opposite route to the same destination. XMR has roughly doubled over the past year, is the second-largest privacy asset at close to $10 billion, and trades above its 6 October level. It is not at a high. The coin reached $798 in January and was changing hands at just over $500 on 10 September.
Monero enforces privacy at the protocol level. Every transaction hides the sender, recipient and amount, with no transparent option and no viewing key. That is the point of the design, and it is also why regulated venues have been withdrawing. Kraken stopped serving Monero to European Economic Area customers on 31 October 2024, two months before MiCA’s full application, following some exchanges’ delisting of the coin in February 2024 and earlier restrictions in Japan and South Korea.
The delistings have not shown up in the price or on the chain. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs found that Monero transaction volumes in 2024 and 2025 ran well above their 2020 and 2021 levels, even as regulated venues fell away. Demand for a ledger that cannot be read appears to be fairly insensitive to where the coin can be bought.
Why Privacy, Why Now
Firstly: surveillance. Steve Vanourny, Grayscale’s head of index, put it plainly in the ZCSH launch release: “As AI reshapes how financial activity can be monitored, we believe demand for genuine financial privacy will only grow.”
Central bank digital currencies feed the same argument. Of 93 central banks the BIS surveyed in 2024, 85 were exploring one, and the People’s Bank of China’s own e-CNY white paper says the currency’s programmability “could be realized by deploying smart contracts” and that it follows the principle of “anonymity for small value and traceable for high value”. Programmable, traceable state money is a design in production, and that causes discomfort.
Secondly, some analysts argue that Zcash offers greater flexibility than Bitcoin on privacy and post-quantum preparedness. The counterpoint to that is that Bitcoin’s more conservative approach to protocol change provides stronger guarantees around predictability and its fixed monetary policy.
Finally, the wider crypto market has been rotating away from previously popular assets into new picks. Glassnode’s numbers show that 91.5 percent of the top 200 assets rose over the past 30 days, the broadest monthly advance in its dataset, yet only 25 of the 200 are higher than they were a year ago. Capital that spent the cycle in governance tokens and low-float, high-valuation launches has been rotating towards assets with a use case that predates the cycle. Privacy blockspace has a decade of demand behind it and a small number of credible suppliers.
Running Out of Steam?
Concentration may prove an issue for the privacy narrative. A sector in which one asset is 62 percent of the total is a sector whose index performance is mostly that asset’s performance. Open interest of $1.78B on ZEC suggests the next large move could be sharp in either direction.
Regulation is another risk. Zcash’s viewing-key model has been accepted by a US-listed fund; Grayscale’s launch release describes viewing keys as a way for holders to disclose transaction details to auditors, counterparties or regulators. Europe has legislated the other way. The EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Regulation, which applies from 10 July 2027, prohibits crypto-asset service providers from keeping any account allowing “the anonymisation or increased obfuscation of transactions, including through anonymity-enhancing coins”, and defines those coins as assets with features that anonymise transfers “either systematically or optionally”. The text does not distinguish between a coin that hides everything and one that lets the holder choose whether to disclose.
Finally, there is durability. Glassnode’s basket measures an eleven-month window that began at the top of the market. Privacy coins have rallied hard before, including in 2025, and given most of it back. What is different this time is the presence of a wrapper trading in US markets, a named institutional buyer in the form of Cypherpunk Technologies and a shielded pool that keeps growing whether or not the price does. Those are the variables to watch when the momentum trade unwinds.
