While the negative sentiment that has dominated the cryptocurrency market in recent weeks has caused sharp pullbacks in many major altcoins, privacy-themed tokens have stood out as a notable exception.
Privacy tokens, the only segment that remained in positive territory along with exchange tokens, recorded the strongest growth since the beginning of the year, attracting investor attention again.
According to the data in the image, privacy-focused projects stand out from all other categories in both weekly performance and year-to-date growth. While the overall market remained negative during this period, established privacy coins like Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), Dash (DASH), and Decred (DCR) gained strong momentum with double-digit gains.
Zcash (ZEC), which topped the list, rose 26.02% in the last week, bringing its market capitalization to $8.3 billion. Monero (XMR) also saw a weekly increase of 11.08%, reaching a market capitalization of $7.28 billion. Another prominent privacy-themed project, Dash (DASH), continued its strong performance, closing the week up 16.03%. Even Decred (DCR), which had long been under the radar, provided support for the category with a 14.31% weekly increase.
Most altcoins outside this segment remain in negative growth territory. For example, projects like Litecoin (LTC), Canton (CC), OriginTrail (TRAC), and Mina (MINA) have seen mostly sideways or limited gains during the week, while the overall market is currently showing a weak outlook. All categories except privacy and exchange tokens have been stuck in negative performance territory since the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile, ZKsync (ZK), among the newer projects in the privacy world or considered infrastructure-focused, has rallied 11.56% in the last week, while Starknet (STRK) has rallied a staggering 40.69%. While these two projects aren’t considered core representatives of the “privacy token” class, the momentum surrounding scalability and ZK-technologies suggests they are attracting significant interest in the category.
Here are the growth rates of the altcoin sectors in fully diluted market capitalization since the beginning of the year:
- Data Collection – -88.1%
- Bitcoin Ecosystem – -83.9%
- Gaming – -81.9%
- Smart Contract Platforms – -80.9%
- Perp DEX – -80.2%
- Staking Services – -79.4%
- Bridges – -79.3%
- DePIN – -76.3%
- Data Services – -75.0%
- RWA (Real World Assets) – -73.7%
- Infrastructure & Services – -70.0%
- File Storage – -69.6%
- NFT Applications – -68.4%
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) – -67.3%
- DeFi – -62.2%
- Gen-1 Smart Contract Platforms – -55.0%
- Social – -55.0%
- Memecoin – -54.7%
- Oracle Protocols – -46.3%
- Store of Value – -13.8%
- Ethereum Ecosystem – -12.9%
- Bitcoin – -7.4%
- Exchange Tokens – +16.5%
- Privacy Tokens – +237.4%
*This is not investment advice.