Source: A16z
Original Title: Privacy trends for 2026
Compiled and Edited by: BitpushNews
1. Privacy will become the most important moat in crypto this year
Privacy is a key feature for the global migration of finance on-chain. However, almost all existing blockchains lack this feature. For most chains, privacy is merely an afterthought. But now, privacy itself has become attractive enough to make a chain stand out among numerous competitors.
Privacy also plays a more important role: it creates a "Chain Lock-in" effect; you can call it the "privacy network effect" if you will. Especially in a world where pure performance is no longer sufficient.
Thanks to cross-chain bridge protocols, migrating from one chain to another is easy as long as everything is public. But once privacy is involved, the situation is completely different: transferring tokens is easy, but transferring secrets is difficult. There is always risk when moving in and out of privacy zones—those monitoring the chain, mempool, or network traffic may identify you. Crossing the boundary between privacy chains and public chains (or even between two privacy chains) leaks various metadata, such as transaction timing and size correlations, making it easier to track users.
Compared to many homogeneous new chains (whose transaction fees may be driven down to zero due to competition, as block space has largely become commoditized), blockchains with privacy features can have stronger network effects. The reality is, if a "general-purpose" chain lacks a thriving ecosystem, killer applications, or unfair distribution advantages, users or developers have little reason to use or build on it, let alone remain loyal.
On public blockchains, users can easily transact with users on other chains, and the choice of chain doesn't matter much. But on privacy blockchains, the chain users choose becomes crucial because once they join, they are less likely to move and risk exposing their identity. This creates a "winner-takes-all" scenario. Since privacy is a necessity for most real-world use cases, a few privacy chains may capture the majority of the crypto market.
— Ali Yahya (@alive_eth), General Partner, a16z crypto
2. This year's proposition for social apps: Not just quantum-resistant, but also decentralized
As the world prepares for quantum computing, many crypto-based social applications (like Apple, Signal, WhatsApp) have been leading the way. The problem is, all mainstream instant messaging tools rely on our trust in private servers run by a single organization. These servers are highly vulnerable to government shutdowns, backdoor installations, or forced handovers of private data.
What's the point of "quantum-resistant encryption" if a country can shut down your server, if a company holds the keys to a private server, or even just if a company owns the private server?
Private servers require "trust me," while no private server means "you don't need to trust me." Communication doesn't need a single intermediary company. Instant messaging requires open protocols that let us trust no one.
The path to achieving this is network decentralization: no private servers, no single application, fully open-source code, and top-tier encryption (including resistance to quantum threats). In an open network, no individual, company, non-profit, or country can deprive us of the ability to communicate. Even if a country or company shuts down one application, 500 new versions will appear the next day. Shut down one node, and new nodes will immediately replace it, thanks to economic incentives provided by technologies like blockchain.
When people own their messages through private keys, just like they own money, everything changes. Applications may come and go, but people will always control their information and identity; end users can own their messages, even if they don't own the application.
This is more important than quantum resistance and encryption; it's about ownership and decentralization. Without these two, we're just building an "indestructible" encryption system that can be shut down at any time.
— Shane Mac (@ShaneMac), Co-founder and CEO, XMTP Labs
3. "Secrets-as-a-Service" will make privacy core infrastructure
Behind every model, agent, and automation lies a simple dependency: data. But today, most data pipelines—whether data input to or output from models—are opaque, mutable, and unauditable.
This is fine for some consumer applications, but many industries and users (like finance and healthcare) require companies to keep sensitive data confidential. This is also a major obstacle for institutions currently seeking to tokenize real-world assets (RWA).
So, how do we enable secure, compliant, autonomous, and globally interoperable innovation while protecting privacy?
There are many methods, but I'll focus on data access control: who controls sensitive data? How does it move? And who (or what) can access it? Without data access control, anyone wanting to maintain data confidentiality currently must use centralized services or build custom setups. This is not only time-consuming and expensive but also prevents traditional financial institutions from fully unleashing the potential of on-chain data management. As AI agent systems begin to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, individuals and institutions across industries will need cryptographic guarantees, not "best-effort trust."
This is why I believe we need "Secrets-as-a-Service": providing programmable, native data access rules through new technologies; client-side encryption; and decentralized key management that enforces who can decrypt what, under what conditions, for how long... all executed on-chain.
Combined with verifiable data systems, secrets can become part of the internet's fundamental public infrastructure, rather than an application-layer patch applied after the fact. This will make privacy core infrastructure.
— Adeniyi Abiodun (@EmanAbio), Chief Product Officer and Co-founder, Mysten Labs
4. Security testing will evolve from "code is law" to "spec is law"
Last year's DeFi hacks affected some battle-tested protocols with strong teams, rigorous audits, and years of operation. These incidents revealed an unsettling reality: today's standard security practices are largely heuristic and handled on a case-by-case basis.
To mature this year, DeFi security needs to move from "finding vulnerability patterns" to "design-level properties," from "best-effort" to a "principled" approach:
In the static/pre-deployment phase (testing, auditing, formal verification): This means systematically proving "Global Invariants" instead of verifying manually selected local variables. AI-assisted proof tools currently being developed by multiple teams can help write specifications (Specs), propose invariants, and take on the expensive manual proof engineering work of the past.
In the dynamic/post-deployment phase (runtime monitoring, runtime enforcement, etc.): These invariants can be translated into real-time guardrails—the last line of defense. These guardrails are written directly as runtime assertions that every transaction must satisfy.
Now, instead of assuming every vulnerability is caught, we enforce critical security properties in the code itself, automatically reverting any transaction that violates these properties.
This isn't just theoretical. In practice, almost every exploit to date would have triggered these checks during execution, stopping hacks at the source.
Thus, the once-popular "Code is Law" evolves into "Spec is Law": even novel attacks must satisfy the security properties that keep the system intact, making any remaining attacks either trivial or extremely difficult to execute.
— Daejun Park (@daejunpark), a16z crypto Engineering Team
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