Privacy Coins by Market Cap and Volume

Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that employ privacy-enhancing technologies to reveal as little information as possible about coin holders and their transactions. Some of the techniques utilized by privacy coins include zero-knowledge proofs, ring signatures, stealth addresses, transaction over Tor, etc.

Many people think that Bitcoin is private because you don’t need to attach a real-world identity to a Bitcoin wallet – they are just seemingly random strings of numbers and letters. However, the Bitcoin blockchain is fully transparent – anyone can go to a Bitcoin block explorer and track the flow of BTC from one wallet to another. If someone manages to associate a Bitcoin address with a real-world identity, it can result in a serious breach of the person’s financial privacy.

In a world that’s increasingly dominated by surveillance technologies, privacy coins are valuable because they provide the option of financial privacy. These coins use various methods to conceal or obfuscate the transactions made by any particular user while still ensuring that all transactions on the blockchain are valid and no coins are being created arbitrarily.