Crypto Privacy In 2026: Compliance-friendly Tools Take Center Stage
In its early days, Bitcoin (BTC) was often viewed as an anonymous payment tool despite its transparency. Since then, the introduction of onchain analytics and surveillance has made it increasingly apparent that transparent blockchains are far from private.
Payment processors being able to clearly determine the parties, products and services involved in transactions allows for censorship. This is far from a theoretical danger, with leading PC game distributor Steam and competitor Itch.io purging adult content in 2025 following pressure from payment processors. Before that, the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was cut off by payment providers, despite the US Treasury stating in 2011 that it could not be sanctioned.
WikiLeaks turned to Bitcoin, cementing it as uncensorable money. Bitcoin was born from the same cypherpunk circles that saw the circulation of Timothy May’s — an engineer influential to Bitcoin development and co-founder of the cypherpunk mailing list — “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
He said that the team “has been doing excellent work designing safer ways of transacting privately.” Williamson chose anoncoin Zcash (ZEC) as his recommendation for the protocol layer until Aztec’s mainnet launch.
Williamson and Fried both recommended Nym for network anonymity. Nym is a decentralized mixnet that chops traffic into fixed-size, layered-encrypted packets and routes them through multiple nodes with random delays and cover traffic, aiming to defeat global traffic analysis rather than just hide the IP address.
A Nym representative told Cointelegraph that “while a centralized VPN might protect your IP address and connection from outside parties, you’re simply placing your trust in the VPN provider, who can see both.”
Their system instead aims to prevent any part of the network from linking the user’s IP address to their assigned external address. “There’s no need to trust Nym, because Nym never knows,“ they said.
Williamson’s recommended communication tool was Signal — a journalist favorite that stores almost no user data and was revealed in March to have been used by senior US national security officials to plan strikes on the Houthis.
On Nov. 19, the co-founders of the Bitcoin non-custodial wallet and mixer Samourai Wallet, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, were sentenced to four and five years in prison, respectively. They were found guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and facilitating transactions in
Source: CoinTelegraph
