{"id":576,"date":"2026-09-11T14:42:32","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T14:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/?p=576"},"modified":"2026-09-11T14:42:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T14:42:33","slug":"privacy-coins-are-the-only-crypto-sector-above-bitcoins-october-peak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/?p=576","title":{"rendered":"Privacy Coins Are the Only Crypto Sector Above Bitcoin&#8217;s October Peak"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Privacy-focused cryptocurrencies have climbed <strong>213%<\/strong> since Bitcoin&#8217;s October 2025 all-time high, making the sector the only category in the market currently trading above where it stood at that peak, according to Glassnode data cited by multiple outlets this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bitcoin<\/strong> itself remains roughly <strong>36%<\/strong> below its October record, and the median asset among the top 200 cryptocurrencies sits <strong>58%<\/strong> lower over the same period. Sectors like DeFi (down 27%) and gaming (down 74%) haven&#8217;t come close to recovering. Against that backdrop, privacy coins stand out as a genuine outlier, with the sector&#8217;s combined market capitalization growing from <strong>$7.1 billion<\/strong> a year ago to roughly <strong>$33.6 billion<\/strong> now \u2014 nearly half of that added in the past month alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZEC<\/strong> is driving most of the move. The token has surged <strong>2,496%<\/strong> over the past year, climbing from the 82nd-largest cryptocurrency by market cap to 7th place, and now accounts for about 62% of the entire privacy sector&#8217;s value. Even stripping Zcash out of the calculation, the remaining basket of privacy assets is still up 85% over the past year and 56% since Bitcoin&#8217;s October peak \u2014 a sign the rally isn&#8217;t confined to a single token. <strong>Monero<\/strong> has doubled in value over the past year and broke out of a multi-year trading range above $600, while <strong>Dash<\/strong> and <strong>Zen<\/strong> have both outperformed Bitcoin over the past 90 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Institutional access has reinforced the move. Grayscale converted its long-running Zcash Trust into a spot ETF on NYSE Arca on August 25 \u2014 the first U.S.-listed spot ETF for a privacy coin \u2014 and the fund&#8217;s assets have already grown into the hundreds of millions. On-chain activity has followed: Zcash&#8217;s network hashrate rose from around 25 GSol\/s in late August to more than 30 GSol\/s in early September, pointing to increased mining participation and network security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Analysts framing the rally point to a structural narrative rather than pure speculation: as AI tools make financial surveillance easier to run at scale, demand for genuinely private, shielded transactions is being treated by some investors as a hedge rather than a niche use case. Whether that thesis holds beyond this cycle remains an open question, but for now, privacy is the one corner of the crypto market that never gave back its October highs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Privacy-focused cryptocurrencies have climbed 213% since Bitcoin&#8217;s October 2025 all-time high, making the sector the only category in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-last-news"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":578,"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions\/578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1stblock.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}