Recently, the surge of ZEC has triggered an interesting phenomenon—the entire privacy track has become popular again. But upon closer inspection, what everyone cares about has changed.

In the past, when discussing privacy coins, the core was anonymous transfers. Now? The focus has shifted to a deeper issue: how to securely put financial data on the blockchain?

Think about why institutions like BlackRock are still on the sidelines, and why the RWA track has yet to explode. The fundamental reason is that data cannot be exposed on-chain. This is the key bottleneck for Web3 to achieve large-scale adoption, and it’s also the "HTTPS moment" we need to solve now.

Breaking it down, the privacy track is actually divided into three layers:

**The first layer is protocol and computational infrastructure.** This is where technological iteration is the fastest and is the core of the entire narrative. Aleo and Namada are redefining privacy public chains with modular architectures. In the Ethereum ecosystem, Aztec, Scroll, and Starknet are using ZK Rollups to kill two birds with one stone—solving scalability and packaging privacy simultaneously.

A new variable is FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption). This technology is quite magical: data can be computed without decrypting. Projects like Zama, Fhenix, and Inco enable AI models to run on-chain while preserving data privacy. Honestly, this might be the most ideal collision between AI and encryption.

**The second layer is infrastructure.** This is the work of the "shovel sellers." This layer mainly addresses cost and efficiency. ZK proof generation has become surprisingly fast, and foundational tools like Succinct, RiscZero, and Lagrange are continuously optimizing, pushing the entire ecosystem forward.