a16z Crypto Deep Dive: Four Assessments on the Development of the Privacy Track in 2026

*Original link: 《 Privacy trends for 2026 *

Compiled by: Ken, ChainCatcher

1. Privacy will be the most important moat in the cryptocurrency space this year.

Privacy is a key element in the global financial shift to on-chain, and it is also an element that almost all existing blockchains lack. For most blockchains, privacy has always been an afterthought. However, today, privacy alone is enough to make a blockchain stand out among many.

Privacy also plays a more important role: it creates a chain lock-in; or, in other words, a privacy network effect. This is particularly important in a world where merely competing on performance is no longer sufficient to win.

Thanks to bridging protocols, migrating from one chain to another is easy as long as all information is public. However, once information becomes private, the situation changes dramatically: bridging tokens is easy, but bridging keys is difficult. Moving in and out of private areas always carries risks, as those monitoring chains, memory pools, or network traffic may identify your identity. Crossing the boundaries between private and public chains—even between two private chains—can leak various metadata, such as the correlation of transaction times and sizes, making it easier to track someone.

Compared to many emerging blockchains with single functions and fierce competition (where block space is essentially the same), blockchains with privacy features have a stronger competitive advantage, as transaction fees on these blockchains are likely to drop to zero due to competition. The reality of network effects is that if a "generic" supply chain does not have a thriving ecosystem, killer applications, or unfair distribution advantages, almost no one will use it or develop on it—let alone remain loyal to it.

When users use public blockchains, they can easily transact with other users on different chains—joining any chain does not matter. But when users use private blockchains, the chain they choose becomes crucial, as once they join a particular chain, they are less likely to switch easily, thus reducing the risk of information leakage. This creates a winner-takes-all scenario. Since privacy is critical for most real-world applications, a few privacy chains could dominate most of the cryptocurrency market.

2. This year, the challenges facing instant messaging applications are not only how to resist quantum attacks but also how to achieve decentralization.

The world is preparing for quantum computing, and many encryption-based instant messaging applications (such as Apple, Signal, and WhatsApp) are leading the way and doing very well. The problem is that all mainstream instant messaging applications rely on our trust in privately operated servers by a single entity. These servers can easily become targets for governments, which can easily shut them down, implant backdoors, or coerce users into handing over private data.

If a country can shut down your server; if a company holds the keys to the private server; or even if just one company owns the private server, what good is quantum encryption?

Private servers require "trust me," but having no private servers means "you don't need to trust me." Communication does not need any intermediary companies. Messaging requires open protocols under which we do not need to trust anyone.

The way to achieve this is through decentralized networks: no private servers, no single applications, all open source, using top-notch encryption technology—including resistance to quantum threats. In an open network, no individual, company, nonprofit organization, or nation can deprive us of our communication capabilities. Even if a country or company shuts down a particular application, 500 new versions will emerge the next day. After shutting down one node, due to technologies like blockchain, there will be economic incentives to immediately replace it with new nodes.

When people control their information like they control their money—through private keys—everything will change. Applications may come and go, but people will always control their information and identity; end users can now own their information even if they no longer use the application.

This is more powerful than quantum resistance and encryption technology; it is ownership and decentralization. Without these two, all we are doing is building an encryption that seems unbreakable but can still be shut down.

3. We will provide "secrets as a service," making privacy a core infrastructure.

Behind every model, agent, and automated process lies a simple dependency: data. However, most data pipelines today—the data that feeds into or comes out of models—are opaque, variable, and un-auditable.

This may be harmless for some consumer applications, but many industries and users (such as finance and healthcare) require companies to protect sensitive data privacy. This is also a significant barrier currently hindering institutions from tokenizing real-world assets.

So, how do we achieve innovation that is secure, compliant, autonomous, and globally interoperable while protecting privacy?

There are many ways, but I will focus on data access control: who controls sensitive data? How is data transmitted? Who (or what) can access it? Without data access control, anyone wanting to keep data confidential currently has to use centralized services or build custom setups—this is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive but also hinders traditional financial institutions and others from fully leveraging the capabilities and advantages of on-chain data management. Users and institutions across various industries need encryption guarantees to autonomously browse, trade, and make decisions, rather than "best-effort trust."

This is why I believe we need secrets as a service: new technologies that can provide programmable, native data access rules; client-side encryption; and decentralized key management that enforces who can decrypt what under what conditions and for how long… all of which are enforced on-chain.

Combined with verifiable data systems, secrets can become part of the internet's basic public infrastructure, rather than an afterthought privacy patch at the application level, thus making privacy a core infrastructure.

4. In security testing, we will shift from "code is law" to "specifications are law."

Last year, DeFi platforms suffered attacks that even affected mature protocols with strong teams, rigorous auditing mechanisms, and years of production experience. These events highlight a disturbing reality: today's standard security practices still largely rely on heuristics and case-by-case handling.

For DeFi security to mature this year, it needs to shift from vulnerability patterns to design-level attributes and from a "best-effort" approach to a "principled" approach:

• In the static/pre-deployment phase (testing, auditing, formal verification), this means systematically proving global invariants rather than validating manually selected local invariants. Currently, multiple teams are building AI-assisted proof tools that can help write specifications, propose invariants, and mitigate the costly manual proof engineering work of the past.

• In the dynamic/post-deployment phase (runtime monitoring, runtime enforcement, etc.), these invariants can be transformed into real-time protective measures: the last line of defense. These protections will be directly encoded as runtime assertions that every transaction must satisfy.

So now, we no longer assume that every bug has been caught; instead, we enforce critical security properties in the code itself, automatically revoking any transactions that violate these properties.

This is not just theoretical. In practice, almost all exploits to date would trigger one of these checks during execution, potentially preventing a hacker attack. Therefore, the once-popular idea of "code is law" has evolved into "specifications are law": even new attacks must satisfy the same security properties to ensure system integrity, leaving remaining attacks either small in scale or extremely difficult to execute.