In short
- Privacy coins including Dash and Decred surged Tuesday morning, while Bitcoin fell below $104,000.
- Analysts attribute the rally to Bitcoin holders seeking anonymity and record retail interest.
- Dash’s rise is largely driven by whales, with the top 100 addresses holding 37% of its supply.
Privacy tokens are staging a dramatic rally, posting double-digit gains even as the broader digital asset market suffers a significant decline.
On Tuesday, while Bitcoin fell below $104,000 and total crypto liquidations again exceeded $1 billion, privacy tokens saw gains.
Dash surged by 47.5% in the last 24 hours, according to the crypto price aggregator CoinGecko. Other tokens in the sector, including Decred, That’s whyand Secretjoined the rally with gains of 90%, 10% and 23% respectively. Zcash surged by double digits Tuesday morning before retracement, and is now 2.3% in the day.
The increase is driven by a flight to assets that offer transactional anonymity amid growing institutional scrutiny of major chains such as Bitcoinanalysts said Decrypt.
“Privacy tokens are gathering mainly on the back of Zcash, which has become the strongest of the group,” said Georgii Verbitskii, founder of DeFi platform TYMIO. He explained that Zcash shares the key fundamentals of Bitcoin-a fixed supply and proof of work consensus mechanism – but it adds a crucial layer of privacy that becomes “increasingly important as Bitcoin gains mainstream … adoption.”
Verbitskii pointed to a key regulatory catalyst fueling the trend. “With global regulation and exchanges required to report wallet ownership to tax authorities starting in 2026, privacy has become one of the strongest narratives in crypto,” he said, noting that “the biggest players are already converting some of their Bitcoins into Zcash.”
“We have also observed some long-time Bitcoin holders converting portions of their BTC into privacy coins like ZEC,” said Slava Demchuk, CEO of blockchain analytics company AMLBot. Decryptechoing Verbitskii’s vision.
He explained that as Bitcoin becomes more institutionalized, it faces greater scrutiny, making privacy-focused assets “one of the few remaining options to preserve transactional anonymity.”
The sales interest surrounding privacy tokens is also pop up.
“According to Google Trends data, the attention of the trade to privacy coins has reached its highest level on record,” said Illia Otychenko, chief analyst at CEX.IO. Decrypt.
He highlighted that for Dash, in particular, the demonstration has a clear driver.
“The first 100 Dash addresses are now holding 37% of the total supply – the highest concentration in a decade,” said Otychenko, indicating that the whales were the first buying force.
He also pointed to local catalysts, including an integration with the privacy-focused Maya Protocol and a listing on the Aster DEX, which increased trading volumes to levels last seen during the 2021 bull market.
The ongoing privacy token demonstration is based on momentum reported first from Decryptwhich was attributed to a new institutional access through Gray scale products and influential endorsements from figures such as venture capitalist Naval Ravikant.
The whales’ collective action, selling FOMO, and a fundamental desire for financial privacy create a powerful counter-trend movement, allowing these assets to decouple from the broader slumping market.
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