Privacy Coins Are Back? 🔒 Our new edition of the Edge newsletter is out, covering the unexpected privacy coin surge. While most crypto bleeds, privacy coins are surging as traders rediscover what digital money was meant to be: private. Here's why this old rebellion suddenly feels relevant again 🧵

The irony: crypto became too transparent. What started as peer-to-peer money turned into a surveillance system where every transaction gets tracked, mapped, and sold to the highest bidder. • ETFs and institutions brought perpetual monitoring • Tornado Cash trials showed privacy could be criminalized • Users realized the system now resembles what crypto set out to replace • Result: demand for truly private alternatives

As analytics firms track every wallet move, traders want somewhere to transact without being watched. Zcash's new Zashi wallet made privacy the default. Now 30% of ZEC transactions use private pools - a record high. The friction that kept users on transparent addresses is gone.

Big shift: Zcash just overtook Monero as the largest privacy coin by market cap. This signals investor rotation toward projects balancing strong privacy with compliance features. • Monero stays steady with battle-tested daily use • Dash upgraded its CoinJoin for faster, semi-private payments • While BTC and ETH drift sideways, privacy coins absorb attention and liquidity