The wind has changed, and it has become quite obvious.

Vitalik Buterin personally funded the Session @session_app privacy communication protocol and then directly established "full-stack privacy" as the strategic direction for Ethereum in 2026-2027 at the Devconnect conference. Almost at the same time, Solana @solana pinned their own privacy ecosystem roadmap on their official Twitter account. It is rare to see two major public chains betting on the same track simultaneously.

The privacy track is actually not a new story. But in the past, it was more about "talking concepts and waiting for the wind to come"; this time feels different.

You see the lineup:
Arcium @Arcium is waving the flag on Solana
0xMiden @0xMiden guarding Polygon @0xPolygon
Zama @zama is building a universal privacy infrastructure layer for the entire blockchain.

There are many more niche players below—privacy payments, confidential smart contracts, privacy trading, and even privacy versions of prediction markets.

In the past, there were only a few scattered projects having fun there, but now it's public-chain-level resources being poured in. The nature is completely different.

Of course, I'm not blindly bullish either. The implementation of privacy technologies does have its thresholds; the performance overhead of FHE and MPC is evident, and whether user experience can keep up is a question mark. However, when it comes to trends, once the pioneers get serious, the subsequent acceleration often exceeds expectations.

Will 2026 be the year of privacy coins? It's hard to say. But laying out plans now is at least not too late.