This year's performance of privacy coins has indeed been quite interesting. Throughout 2025, the market generally cooled down, yet this particular sector kept climbing steadily, completely breaking the usual bull-bear rhythm, as if suddenly awakened by capital during a period of little attention.

But to say this is something new, it's not really. Looking back at history, whenever market sentiment turns sour, privacy coins tend to show similar independent movements. They seem mysterious on the surface, but the underlying logic is quite simple—privacy coins have never been the darlings of a bull market.

Think about the bull market period, what did the market care about? Grand narratives, market consensus, whose story sounds more impressive. But once the trend starts to turn, overlooked details like regulatory expectations, compliance issues, capital inflows and outflows, and account security come to the forefront. People suddenly realize that rules might not be as friendly as they thought. At this point, privacy becomes a real concern.

So you'll find that when privacy coins rise, it's often not because of optimism about a grand future, but because people are thinking about how to hedge risks. They are just tools, with no particular faith involved.

Interestingly, because of this trait, privacy coins often attract capital precisely when no one wants to tell stories. During dead times, even the best narratives can't fetch high prices—only assets that don't rely on consensus and are purely based on their own functionality truly have a chance to turn around.