The privacy coins monero and zcash managed to see fewer percentage losses against the U.S. dollar this week, in contrast to crypto assets like bitcoin, ethereum, and solana. Seven-day statistics indicate zcash has lost 5.6% against the USD, while monero dropped by 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 of writing, the entire market capitalization of all the privacy coins in existence is roughly $5.55 billion. Monero (XMR) leads the pack with a market valuation of around $2.64 billion or 47.5% of the entire privacy coin economy. Zcash (ZEC) is the second largest privacy coin in terms of market capitalization as ZEC’s overall market valuation today is $789 million.
Behind XMR and ZEC, are privacy tokens such as decred (DCR), nucypher (NU), secret (SCRT), horizen (ZEN), ergo (ERG), digibyte (DGB), and beldex (BDX), respectively. Top privacy coin double-digit gainers this week include deeponion (ONION), litecash (CASH), pivx (PIVX), and masari (MSR). The week’s top privacy coin losers in terms of percentage losses include tokens like zclassic (ZCL), lethean (LTHN), and phore (PHR).
The top five privacy coin crypto assets make up most of the $5.55 billion in privacy coin value, and each token offers different types of privacy techniques. XMR is a Cryptonote token with a blockchain protocol that was not forked from Bitcoin. XMR uses ring signatures, ring confidential transactions, stealth addresses, bulletproofs, and Dandelion++. The ZEC network can shield transactions by leveraging a zero-knowledge proof called zk-SNARKs.
Decred (DCR) utilizes a Coinjoin mixing scheme called Coinshuffle++ (CSPP) to obfuscate transactions. Nucypher (NU) deploys Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE), a technology that allows the owner of the private key to encrypt data. Similar to NU, the Secret (SCRT) blockchain provides key management techniques, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) schemes combined with encryption to enhance privacy.
While privacy coins have taken less of a beating this week compared to ETH or BTC, they still have lost quite a bit of value during the last year. Four months ago the privacy crypto coin economy was worth a whole lot more, at $10.7 billion. XMR’s overall market valuation was $4.13 billion and ZEC’s was $1.84 billion on April 28, 2022. Nine months ago on November 6, 2021, the privacy token economy was worth $14.9 billion.
At that time in November 2021, NU was not in the top five, as horizen (ZEN) held the fifth position in terms of privacy coins by market cap. XMR’s overall market valuation was $4.69 billion. ZEC’s market capitalization on November 6, 2021 was slightly higher than the April 28, 2022 record with $1.94 billion. In November 2021, XMR’s and ZEC’s market caps combined were larger than today’s privacy coin economy value.
What do you think about the privacy coin market action in recent times? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.