There is a little more than a month left until the end of 2025, but everything indicates that cryptocurrencies with privacy foundations have become the sector that shines the most in the market.
The market capitalization of this niche exceeds 19 billion dollars, which represents an annual increase of 240%.
In the following image it is seen that privacy cryptocurrencies surpass exchange tokens in capitalizationwhich show a return close to 38% in the same period.
They also leave behind NFT applications, whose progress is around 4% annually, always in terms of market capitalization. The rest of the sectors, including the sector gaming or the Bitcoin ecosystem, have accumulated double-digit drops in the last 12 months.
A tool to evade “intrusive mechanisms”
Yoandris Rives Rodríguez, Regional Manager for LATAM at the B2BINPAY exchange, analyzed this phenomenon with CriptoNoticias and explained: “Privacy-based cryptocurrencies tend to perform better in periods in which markets reevaluate the value of autonomy, discretion in transactions and data security.”
The specialist noted that “it is a logical reaction to two converging forces: global payment surveillance standards are being tightened, while institutions demand greater traceability of digital assets.” Furthermore, he stated:
Typically, when compliance mechanisms become more intrusive, certain market segments try to evade them.
Yoandris Rives Rodríguez, Regional Manager for LATAM at the B2BINPAY exchange.
Rives Rodríguez’s approach points to a dynamic that is already being reflected in the data: the stricter regulatory frameworks and financial oversight mechanisms becomethe greater the incentive to migrate towards tools that preserve privacy.
As pressure for absolute traceability grows – from both States and financial institutions – users operating in digital environments They end up strengthening precisely what such controls attempt to limit.
In that sense, the rebound in these assets works as a thermometer of a deeper tension between regulation, autonomy and real demand for privacy.
Zcash leads the privacy crypto niche
This rally is explained, in part, for the great performance that zcash (ZEC) has had in the last 12 months. The cryptocurrency has seen a 1,000% increase and is back trading above $600, a level not seen since 2017.
At the moment, ranks 15th in the top 100 most valuable digital assets on the market. Its capitalization exceeds 8.42 billion dollars.
Behind this rise there are also key corporate movements. As CriptoNoticias has reported, Leap Therapeutics – now called Cypherpunk Technologies – made a complete change in its strategy and began to buy ZEC. It has already invested $50 million to acquire more than 203,000 coins and is aiming for an ambitious goal: gather 5% of the total supply. To finance this plan, the company will use a treasury scheme based on the issuance of shares and debt.
In parallel, Zcash presented Zashi CrossPay, a privacy-focused tool that allows you to send ZEC and more than a hundred assets from the NEAR ecosystem without filtering metadata or relying on exchanges.
ZEC’s renewed push also revived miners. With improved profitability, Equihash-based teams were once again among the most competitive on the market.
For its part, Grayscale, one of the largest digital asset managers in the market, launched an investment fund focused on ZEC on November 6, thus expanding institutional exposure to privacy cryptocurrencies.
Interest in other privacy cryptocurrencies expands
ZEC’s renewed prominence not only boosted its own value, but also reignited market interest in other established privacy cryptocurrencies, such as monero (XMR) and dash (DASH).
In the case of XMR, its price increased by over 100% in the last 12 months. Its capitalization, meanwhile, is 7.37 billion dollars. Currently, it is ranked 17th in the ranking of the most valuable assets on the market.
For its part, DASH shows a similar dynamic, with an annual increase of 100%. Meanwhile, the market capitalization is 824 million dollars.
ZEC’s extraordinary growth acted as a catalyst within the sector. This attracted a flow of capital into assets with similar propositions and strengthened the narrative that privacy is once again central to the ecosystem.
When a privacy asset shows such exceptional performance, the market tends to reevaluate the potential of the rest of the coins with similar characteristics.
For this reason, ZEC’s push ended up expanding interest in established projects such as XMR and DASH. These currencies benefited from renewed demand for solutions focused on confidentiality.