Privacy Coins Rise 213% as Median Altcoin Sinks 58%

Crypto has spent the past month recovering, but one corner of the market has been playing an entirely different game.

New Glassnode data shows privacy coins are 213% above their level when Bitcoin peaked on Oct. 6, 2025. The median asset among the top 200, meanwhile, remains 58% below its price on that date.

Bitcoin itself is still about 36% below the October high.

More strikingly, privacy is the only sector above its level at the Bitcoin peak. Every other Glassnode sector remains underwater, ranging from DeFi at roughly -27% to gaming at -74%.

Zcash Dominates, but It Doesn’t Explain Everything

Zcash is responsible for much of the spectacular headline number.

ZEC has risen 2,496% over the past year and now accounts for roughly 62% of the privacy sector’s capitalization, according to Glassnode. It climbed from No. 82 to No. 7 by market capitalization.

The latest leg has been reinforced by new institutional access. Grayscale’s Zcash ETF, launched Aug. 25, had already attracted about $34.4 million in net inflows by Sept. 4 as ZEC pushed above $1,000. Network computing power also rose from around 25 GSol/s in late August to above 30 GSol/s.

Coinpaper’s look at the recent Zcash breakout shows another side of the trade: futures open interest has reached roughly $2.3 billion, making the rally increasingly sensitive to leverage.

Yet removing Zcash does not destroy Glassnode’s thesis.

The privacy basket excluding ZEC is still up 85% over one year and 56% since Bitcoin’s October high.

That is what turns this from a Zcash story into a sector story.

Monero and Dash Show the Rotation Is Broader

All eight privacy assets with at least one year of history are positive over that period, while only about one in eight top-200 cryptocurrencies can say the same.

Monero doubled over the year, while XMR, DASH and ZEN have each beaten Bitcoin during the past 90 days.

The trend was visible earlier in 2026 when Dash surged 71% alongside gains in XMR, DCR and ZEN. Monero also broke out of a multi-year range when XMR surged above $600.

More recently, privacy coins again led the broader market as Bitcoin cleared $81,000, with ZEC and DASH among the strongest movers.

A $7.1B Sector Became a $33.6B Market

The privacy sector was worth just $7.1 billion one year ago.

Glassnode now puts it at $33.6 billion, meaning roughly $26.5 billion of market value has been added. Nearly half of that expansion came during the latest 30-day period.

That happened during an unusually broad crypto bounce: 91.5% of the top 200 assets gained over the past month.

But breadth disappears over longer periods. Only 25 top-200 assets are positive over one year.

Among the 25 largest assets, just four sit above their Oct. 6 prices: ZEC, HYPE, XMR and WBT.

Two are privacy coins.

Regulatory risk has not disappeared either. Privacy assets have historically faced tougher exchange and AML scrutiny, a tension Coinpaper has covered around privacy regulation.