Guide · Markets
Privacy Coins: What Zcash, Monero and Dash Actually Hide, and Why Exchanges Worry
Bitcoin isn't anonymous; privacy coins try to be, each in its own way. How they work, why Binance delisted Monero in 2024, and how Zcash went from $185 to nearly $1,700 in 2026.
Bitcoin is often described as anonymous. It isn't. Every Bitcoin transaction, with its sending address, receiving address and amount, sits on a public ledger anyone can read, and blockchain-analysis firms have become very good at linking addresses to real people, often through the exchanges where coins are bought and sold. Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies designed to hide some or all of that information. They are also, at the moment, one of the most volatile corners of the market.
They don't all hide the same things, or in the same way:
Monero (XMR) makes privacy the default for every transaction. Ring signatures mix the real sender with a set of decoys, one-time stealth addresses hide the receiver, and a technique called RingCT conceals the amount. There is no transparent mode to opt out into.
Zcash (ZEC) relies on zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs), which let the network confirm a transaction is valid without seeing who paid whom or how much. But privacy is optional: Zcash has transparent addresses that work much like Bitcoin's, alongside shielded ones, and users choose which to use.
Dash (DASH) offers CoinJoin, originally called PrivateSend, which mixes coins from several users into a single transaction so individual payments are harder to follow. It is also optional, and a weaker form of privacy than the other two, since amounts and addresses remain on a public ledger.
Those differences matter most to exchanges, which have to follow anti-money-laundering rules built on the assumption that funds can be traced. A coin in which every transaction is private is much harder for them to support than one where privacy is opt-in, and several exchanges have delisted privacy coins in recent years, sometimes only in certain countries. Binance is a clear example. On February 6, 2024, it announced it would delist Monero; on Binance that day, XMR fell from about $165 to as low as $100, a 39% intraday drop, and trading there ended on February 20, 2024. Zcash stayed listed.
That is the first thing to understand about trading these coins: they carry a kind of risk most coins don't. A delisting doesn't change the underlying technology, but it can cut off a major source of liquidity almost overnight, and the price reacts to that straight away.
The second is volatility. Zcash's 2026 is an extreme case. It fell to $184.57 on February 6, recovered, then crashed again in June, at one point losing more than 60% in about two days to $250. From there it climbed to a peak of $1,698 on September 26, more than nine times its February low. On its busiest day, September 23, it traded $653 million on Binance, more than Solana did. Three days after the peak it was around $1,385, roughly 20% lower. Dash has travelled with it, from a 2026 low of $28.84 on July 29 to a close of $71.84 on September 26, before falling back to about $60.
Why do they move together? Partly because traders treat privacy coins as a sector: when privacy becomes a talking point, whether through new surveillance rules, a high-profile hack or a regulatory debate, money tends to flow into the whole group at once. And partly because their markets are smaller than those of the largest coins, so the same flow pushes prices further in both directions.
None of this says whether privacy coins are good or bad investments. It says they are a distinct category, combining a real technical feature, a regulatory status that can change quickly and price swings several times larger than Bitcoin's. Any position in one deserves to be sized with all three in mind.