Privacy coins have had their year. Glassnode put the sector at $33.6 billion in early September, up from $7.1 billion twelve months earlier, with Zcash at 62 percent of it. The argument for them fits in one sentence: Bitcoin cannot do privacy, so privacy needs its own coin.
That is only partly true, and which part is true depends on what you want to hide. Bitcoin can already hide who gets paid and which coins belong together. It cannot hide how much. Only Zcash and Monero do that on a live network, and each pays for it somewhere you should know about before you buy.
A payment gives away three things
Anyone reading an ordinary Bitcoin payment on the chain sees three things: the address that was paid, the coins the sender combined to pay it, and the amount.
On Bitcoin, each privacy tool hides only one of these three things. That is why "Bitcoin privacy" is not one project but several, and why "can Bitcoin do privacy?" has no simple answer. The useful question is not whether a chain is private, but which of the three things it hides.
Bitcoin already hides who gets paid
Silent Payments, specified in BIP 352, give the recipient one reusable address. For each payment, the sender creates a new destination on the blockchain that cannot be linked to the address or to other payments. The address itself never appears on the chain. It costs no extra block space and needs no contact between the two sides.
Silent Payments are not just a proposal; you can use them in wallets today. On 21 August 2026 the overview at silentpayments.xyz listed Cake Wallet, Sparrow, BlindBit Desktop and Dana for sending and receiving, plus BitBox02, BlueWallet, Nunchuk and Wasabi for sending only. The cryptography they need has been in libsecp256k1, the library many Bitcoin programs use for their signatures, since version 0.8.0 of 3 August.
Only Bitcoin Core, the standard software for Bitcoin nodes, cannot do it yet. Its developers merged the groundwork on 23 September 2026, but sending and receiving are not finished, and no released version contains any of it. New code also brings new bugs: in August BitBox fixed a firmware flaw through which a compromised computer could redirect a Silent Payment to the wrong address.
You can already hide who gets paid on Bitcoin, just not with Bitcoin Core yet.
That leaves the second trail: which coins the sender combines.
Bitcoin also hides which coins belong together, at a legal price
Anyone analysing a blockchain leans on one assumption: all the coins that go into a transaction belong to the same person.
PayJoin undermines that assumption. The recipient adds a coin of their own to the payment, so not all the coins belong to the sender any more. The method in BIP 78 has officially counted as in use since May 2026. The newer version, BIP 77, in which both sides do not need to be online at the same time, is still a draft. Every PayJoin makes the assumption a little less reliable, including for people who never use it.
CoinJoin goes a step further. Many participants put their coins into one shared transaction so that nobody can tell whose coins went to whom. Greg Maxwell described the technique in August 2013, and it still works. What changed is the law around it. The founders of Samourai Wallet pleaded guilty in July 2025 to conspiring to run an unlicensed money transmitter and were sentenced to five and four years in prison. zkSNACKs shut down the Wasabi coordinator on 1 June 2024, citing regulatory uncertainty. Other providers have run such coordinators since. Exchanges have frozen funds with a CoinJoin history, Binance for example in December 2019, with a user who had used Wasabi.
CoinJoin still works technically. Offering it as a service has become a legal risk.
That leaves the third trail, the amount. This is where privacy coins make their case.
Zcash hides amounts, and paid for it with a four-year-old bug
Zcash has transparent addresses that behave like Bitcoin's, and shielded pools in which sender, recipient and amount are encrypted. Shielding is optional. In the 30 days to 8 October 2026, 54 percent of transactions had a shielded part according to the indexer ZecBlock, and about a quarter were fully shielded. On 9 October 4.95 million ZEC sat in shielded pools, 29 percent of supply. Most coins still sit in the open.
On 29 May 2026 Taylor Hornby, working for Shielded Labs, found a flaw in the Orchard pool that allowed coins to be created from nothing. It had been in the code since the pool launched in May 2022. Whether anyone used it cannot be determined from cryptography alone, Shielded Labs wrote, because the pool hides exactly the amounts one would need to check. ZEC fell 38 percent within 24 hours of the disclosure, per CoinDesk. On 28 July the Ironwood upgrade closed Orchard to new deposits.
A pool that hides amounts also hides its own counterfeits.
That is not a reason to avoid Zcash. It is the price of the feature, and it belongs in the buying decision.
Monero hides everything, and pays with access
Monero hides sender, recipient and amount on every transaction, with no transparent option. That default is exactly what exchanges object to. Kraken dropped XMR for UK clients in 2021, Binance in February 2024, Kraken in the European Economic Area in October 2024. Since June 2026 Kraken trades neither XMR nor ZEC for clients in the United Arab Emirates.
The privacy you cannot switch off is the privacy exchanges switch off.
Fewer venues mean fewer buyers and sellers, and worse prices when you want out.
Technically, Monero today hides each sender in a ring of 16 possible senders. With the planned FCMP++ upgrade, each sender would hide among all past payments, about 100 million instead of 16, according to getmonero.org. It is not in use yet. The project wrote on 10 May 2026 that no fork date was set, and the current release, 0.18.5.1 from July, does not contain it. It has been running on a test network since May. Swap sites such as xgram.io describe FCMP++ as active since January 2026; the Monero project itself says otherwise.
The objection: "Bitcoin will get shielded amounts soon"
On 24 September Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin of [alloc] init published "Shielded Bitcoin", a design for encrypting amounts on Bitcoin much as Zcash does, without changing Bitcoin's rules. If that works, why buy a privacy coin?
Because the paper describes only half the system, and says so itself. Its abstract states: peg-in and peg-out, "the mechanisms by which value enters and exits the shielded transfer system", fall outside its scope. They are left to a companion paper built on PIPEs v2. For that scheme, Komarov himself put the data at 338 terabytes in February.
The published half has costs too. Komarov wrote on the Delving Bitcoin forum that the proof system needs a one-time setup in which participants must be trusted, a so-called trusted setup, and that the security holds only if at least one participant was honest. Crypto Briefing had reported the opposite on the day of publication. In an interview with crypto.news, Komarov estimated around 700 virtual bytes per transfer, roughly four times the fee of an ordinary payment. Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers of Pauli Group called the design interesting but "not quantum resistant at all".
Shielded Bitcoin describes how coins move inside the shielded system. How they get in is still unwritten.
Which tool for which need
| You want to hide | Available today | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| who gets paid | Silent Payments (Cake, Sparrow, BlindBit, Dana) | not in Bitcoin Core yet; young code |
| which coins belong together | PayJoin, CoinJoin | CoinJoin: legal risk for coordinators, frozen deposits possible |
| the amount | shielded Zcash, Monero | Zcash: counterfeiting risk 2022–2026 cannot be checked; Monero: fewer exchanges |
| the amount, on Bitcoin | nothing live | Shielded Bitcoin: entry and exit unpublished |
The table replaces "privacy coin or Bitcoin?" with a question you can answer. If you want to receive donations without every payment sitting on the same address, you do not need a privacy coin. If you must hide amounts, there is no way around Zcash or Monero today, and you should know their price.
Three questions help with every new announcement. Is it in use, only on a testnet, or just a research paper? If it is in use, is it in Bitcoin Core or only in individual apps? And what does the paper say it does not cover? For FCMP++ the answer to the first question is: testnet. For Shielded Bitcoin the answer to the third is: the way in and out is missing.
The next checkpoints are set: whether Monero picks a date for FCMP++, whether Silent Payments sending and receiving land in a Bitcoin Core release, and whether the companion paper solves entry and exit at a size a node can carry.
FAQ
Is using CoinJoin illegal? The Samourai convictions concerned running an unlicensed money-transmitting service, not using a wallet. The legal position depends on the country. Separately, exchanges can refuse deposits with a CoinJoin history.
Is the $33.6 billion still current? The figure is Glassnode's, as of early September. CoinGecko's "Privacy Coins" category showed $37.9 billion on 25 September, with ZEC at about 71 percent. The two count different coins and are not directly comparable.
If Monero hides everything, why isn't it simply the safer choice? Because its sender privacy currently rests on a ring of 16 possible senders, a sample from the history. Möser and colleagues showed in 2018 that in Monero's early years, with smaller rings, the real sender could be deduced by elimination for about 62 percent of inputs with at least one decoy. Monero has since enforced larger rings and changed how decoys are picked. FCMP++ is meant to replace the sample with the whole history and is not live yet.
Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast. Historical patterns are not a promise.
Sources: Glassnode via PANews (7 September 2026) · CoinGecko, Privacy Coins category (25 September 2026) · BIP 352, BIP 78, BIP 77 (github.com/bitcoin/bips) · silentpayments.xyz wallet overview (21 August 2026) · libsecp256k1 PR #1765 and release 0.8.0 (3 August 2026) · Bitcoin Core PRs #35301, #35302, #32966 · BitBox firmware 9.26.5 (18 August 2026), via crypto.news · Greg Maxwell, "CoinJoin: Bitcoin privacy for the real world", bitcointalk (22 August 2013) · US DOJ SDNY, Samourai Wallet (19 November 2025) · CoinDesk, Samourai guilty plea (30 July 2025) · zkSNACKs via NoBS Bitcoin (2 May 2024) · Cointelegraph, Binance and CoinJoin (December 2019) · ZecBlock, privacy and shielded-pool statistics (9 October 2026) · Shielded Labs, "The Orchard Counterfeiting Vulnerability" (4 June 2026) · CoinDesk, ZEC drop (5 June 2026) · ZIP 258 and CoinDesk on Ironwood (28 July 2026) · Kraken Support: Monero in the EEA, UAE delistings (1 June 2026) · Binance, XMR delisting (6 February 2024) · Luke Parker, getmonero.org, FCMPs (27 April 2024) · getmonero.org, "Deprecating Monero's Custom Transaction Unlock Time" (10 May 2026), release 0.18.5.1 (8 July 2026) · Shikhelman, Komarov, Moskvin, "Shielded Bitcoin: Private Transfers on the Bitcoin L1" (24 September 2026) · Komarov on Delving Bitcoin (24 September 2026) and "Bitcoin PIPEs v2" (12 February 2026) · Crypto Briefing (24 September 2026) · crypto.news, Komarov interview (25 September 2026) · Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers on X (24 September 2026), via Cointelegraph · Möser et al., "An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain", PoPETs 2018
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