Compared to crypto assets like bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, the privacy coins Monero and Zcash lost less value against the U.S. dollar this week. In the past week, Zcash has lost 5.6% of its value against the USD, while Monero has lost 6.1%.
Privacy Coins Manage to Stave off Some of This Week’s Market Carnage, but Are Still Down 62% Lower Than 9 Months Ago
At the time this was written, the total value of all privacy coins on the market was about $5.55 billion. Monero (XMR) is the most valuable privacy coin, with a market value of about $2.64 billion, or 47.5% of the whole economy of privacy coins. Zcash (ZEC) is the second biggest privacy coin in terms of market capitalization, with a total market valuation of $789 million.
Behind XMR and ZEC are privacy tokens like decred (DCR), nucypher (NU), secret (SCRT), horizen (ZEN), ergo (ERG), digibyte (DGB), and beldex (BDX), respectively. This week, deeponion (ONION), litecoin (CASH), pivx (PIVX), and masari are the top privacy coins with double-digit gains (MSR). Tokens like zclassic (ZCL), lethean (LTHN), and phore are among the top privacy coins that lost the most percentage points this week (PHR).
Most of the $5.55 billion worth of privacy coins comes from the top five crypto assets. Each token offers a different way to protect your privacy. XMR is a Cryptonote token that uses a blockchain protocol that was not forked from Bitcoin. XMR uses ring signatures, ring private transactions, stealth addresses, bulletproofs, and Dandelion++. Zk-SNARKs, which are a type of zero-knowledge proof, are used by the ZEC network to hide transactions.
Decred (DCR) uses a mixing method called Coinshuffle++ (CSPP) to hide transactions. This method is based on Coinjoin. Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE), which is used by Nucypher (NU), is a technology that lets the owner of the private key encrypt data. The Secret (SCRT) blockchain is similar to NU in that it uses key management, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) schemes, and encryption to improve privacy.
Even though privacy coins have lost less value this week than ETH or BTC, they have still lost a lot of value over the past year. The privacy crypto coin economy was worth a lot more four months ago, when it was worth $10.7 billion. On April 28, 2022, the market valuation of XMR was $4.13 billion and that of ZEC was $1.84 billion. The privacy token economy was worth $14.9 billion on November 6, 2021, nine months ago.
At that time, in November 2021, NU was not in the top five privacy coins by market cap. Instead, horizen (ZEN) was in fifth place. The value of XMR on the market as a whole was $4.69 billion. With $1.94 billion, ZEC’s market capitalization on November 6, 2021 was just a little bit more than its record on April 28, 2022. In November 2021, the total market capitalization of XMR and ZEC was more than the value of the privacy coin economy today.
