Privacy Is Very Important And Is Being Negleted By Everyone, Where's The Hype For Privacy Coins?

Privacy is something that is becoming very important and people are still negleting it. Now with CBDCs being a reality the need for privacy is even greater. Satoshi had a lot of discussions on how important privacy is before disappearing.

There are many privacy coins on the market and some of them with good features, lets look at some of the most developed and with most features.

Monero (27th place by Market Cap.)

The most successfull and proven privacy coin in this space is Monero. Monero relies on ring signatures to achieve privacy and has privacy by default, meaning that every transaction is private. Monero is the biggest privacy coin by market capitalization and since its inception it never had its privacy broken, it even had bounties to break its privacy. Monero is known for being a currency that does exactly what it's supposed to do and does it well, it's strange how this successfull privacy coin is so far from the top of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the space, specially when it's used by so many market places and P2P exchanges.

ZCash (116h place by Market Cap.)

After the most used privacy currency comes ZCash. ZCash is a privacy currency based on the zero knowledge protocol or zk-Snarks, this allows ZCash blockchain to hide the sender, receiver and amount of any transaction. Transactions can be done in a visible way or in a private way, making ZCash not private by default, but with the option to do private transactions. The second biggest privacy coin is out of the top-100 by market capitalization, which says a lot about the state of privacy coins.

Horizen (240th place by Market Cap.)

Horizen is a blockchain based on zk-Snarks aswell, but with the difference of having a well developed Defi ecosystem. Horizen operates like the others above, using a proof of work system, but it also uses Masternodes to secure its blockchain, users can operate these masternodes and receive ZEN in return for operating them. Horizen also works like a layer 0 blockchain, allowing other blockchains to be build on top of it. EVM integration is also on the way, making Horizen compatible with Ethereum smart-contracts. Horizen is an highly developed ecosystem, but it has low traction when it comes to price action.

Secret Network (326th by Market Cap.)

An IBM made to bring Defi to privacy coins. Secret is a blockchain that enables smart-contracts for privacy coins and tokens. It managed to bring bridged Monero to Defi apps, making Monero capable of being on decentralized finance. Secret has a very solid case of applications that bring privacy to Defi, Web3, machine learning and a lot of other things. This project had some hype in the last bull run, but slowly got out of the top 100 by market cap. and now is sitting much lower with almost no attention given to it by the crypto space.

PIVX (670th place by Market Capitalization)

This is a project that was born on 2015, it uses proof of stake to achieve consensus and has highly developed privacy methods. It uses SHIELD to achieve privacy, which is a variant of zk-Snarks aswell. This project was lauched as a data protection project. This project also has a second layer that allows a decentralized governance mechanism of voting. The project is run by a DAO and had a fair lauch, with no premine or ICO. The development of the project is still growing strong with already many new features announced to come to it's layer 2 protocol based on masternodes

Firo (720th place by Market Cap.)

Another project with a lot of development and almost no traction on the market. Firo allows for users to destroy their coins completely and redeem them later. It uses the Lelantus protocol developed by Firo developers, this protocol uses zk-Snarks, but supports high anonimity without requiring a trusted setup. This project is constantly developing and bringing new features to the privacy scene. Although it's a very developed cryptocurrency, it fell bellow rank 600 by market capitalization.

There are also some honorable mentions to Grin and Haven. Grin is based on mimblewimble which doesn't record any transaction and doesn't need addresses, the wallets need to talk to each other online to transact, making the whole process very lightweight. Haven aimed to be a revolutionary blockchain in the privacy field, there's a decentralized private stablecoin launched on Haven called xUSD, this stablecoin is deppeged from USD and now sits at 0,14 USD having almost no liquidity. It was a good idea to try and have a completely private stablecoin but it all went down the hill for this stablecoin.

Although there's a lot of different options in the privacy space and a lot of different developing technologies, besides Monero nothing really gets traction and private coins seem to be left in disuse. Almost every privacy coin is sitting bellow the top 100 rank by market capitalization, which tells a very dark scenario for this coins. Even in the crypto space, privacy is still very negleted.