Original Article Title: "Naval's Pump Signal Drives ZEC Surge, What Other Projects in the Privacy Narrative Are Worth Paying Attention To?"

Original Article Author: David, DeepTech TechFlow

October's Uptober market belonged to both the lively Binance new meme and some long-forgotten ancient coins.

In the slang, these old coins are called "Dino Coins," referring to those that pioneered certain tracks but have since seen their initial hype fade away.

For example, ZEC (Zcash), starting from a low point around $53 at the end of September, surged to $230 a week after the National Day holiday, with a monthly gain of over 370%. What drove the revival of this old coin was not institutional buying or technological upgrades, but rather a tweet.

On October 1st, Silicon Valley legendary investor with 2.9 million followers, Naval Ravikant, posted a highly controversial viewpoint on X platform: "Bitcoin is the anti-fiat insurance, and Zcash is the anti-Bitcoin insurance."

Subsequently, ZEC quickly soared, and other privacy coins also reaped long-awaited gains amid overflowing sentiment. Amid the rise, the long-missing privacy narrative suddenly became a hot topic once again.

If you missed out on ZEC's surge, why not join us in reviewing the ins and outs of this old coin's new pump, to see how influential the big players really are and what opportunities in the privacy track are worth paying attention to next.

Conflicts of Interest, Old Coin New Pump

Naval Ravikant is a prominent figure in the Silicon Valley investment circle. As the co-founder of AngelList, he built this $4 billion-valued startup funding platform.

His personal investment track record is also quite impressive, with early investments in over 200 companies such as Uber and Twitter.

In the crypto field, Naval's credentials are equally strong. In 2014, he co-founded MetaStable Capital, one of the earliest crypto hedge funds. According to public reports, the fund achieved a 540% return in 2017, with early holdings including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other crypto assets.

On October 1, Naval tweeted that Zcash is Bitcoin's defense insurance. Subsequent tweets then argued Bitcoin's lack of privacy, pointing out that Bitcoin's public ledger makes it so even "Satoshi Nakamoto himself couldn't use Bitcoin" without revealing his identity, and governments/banks can track all transactions through chain analysis.

Meanwhile, Zcash can complement Bitcoin rather than compete with it, using zero-knowledge proofs to hide key information such as sender, receiver, and amount.

The issue is that these benefits of Zcash are not newly discovered today; it seems more like a whale's accidental shill for an old coin as the relevant privacy narrative has long been cold.

Looking at the timeline, Naval's tweets align closely with ZEC's skyrocketing price. However, Naval may not be entirely neutral as there are undisclosed vested interests.

From various public reports, it can be seen that as early as 2015, Naval invested $715,000 in a company called Zerocoin Electric Coin Company, which later renamed itself to Electric Coin Company, the very entity that developed Zcash.

In addition, Naval had previously served on the Zcash Foundation board, holding some governance influence.

Therefore, this whale-sized investor's shilling of an old coin has drawn criticism from the community, with many believing he is leveraging influence to pump projects in his early investment portfolio, making it hard to see this as a neutral technical discussion or investment advice.

Interestingly, Naval has remained silent on these criticisms, neither confirming nor denying.

Regardless of the controversy, Naval's influence has undeniably shown in the price action. His tweet garnered 2.9 million views, sparking a series of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to follow suit. Balaji Srinivasan (former a16z CTO), Mert Mumtaz (Helius CEO), and others have all posted in support of privacy coins, further fueling market sentiment.

The end result is that ZEC surged from $53 at the end of September to $230, marking over a 300% increase since his tweet pumping the coin.

Emotion Overflow, Privacy Race Chain Reaction

Naval's shilling not only pumped ZEC, but in recent days, the sentiment has spread to the entire privacy coin sector.

Railgun (RAIL) has become the biggest dark horse. This relatively niche privacy coin surged by 240% during the same period, rising from $1.79 to a high of $4.83. The 24-hour trading volume skyrocketed by 1270%.

In addition to the emotion overflow from ZEC, Railgun also benefited from other catalytic events.

On October 9, the Ethereum Foundation released the Kohaku privacy roadmap, which specifically mentioned integrating Railgun's zk-multisig technology, a privacy feature that Vitalik has long favored.

Furthermore, some other privacy coins also saw decent price surges.

During ZEC's meteoric rise, Grayscale also announced the reopening of its Zcash Trust for private placements.

The Grayscale Trust serves as a compliant channel for traditional funds to enter the cryptocurrency space. While not as popular as the Bitcoin and Ethereum Trusts, it holds significant importance for ZEC and is one of the few ways institutional funds can compliantly hold ZEC.

According to official data, the current Assets Under Management (AUM) of the Zcash Trust has reached around $85 million, and its per-share price has surged by 340% in the past 6 months.

With all this news coming out simultaneously, the market has once again turned its attention to the privacy race. Although it's difficult to precisely quantify the specific inflow of funds, the increase in social media buzz is quite evident.

In addition to the mentioned tokens, some projects may also benefit from this short-term sentiment-driven privacy narrative.

1. Aster: Dark Pool and Privacy Trading

There's no need to mention Aster's popularity, but few have paid attention to its Dark Pool mode.

As a chain-based Perp DEX, one of its highlights is the "Hidden Orders" feature. It allows the order's size, price, and direction to be completely hidden before execution, only confirming the on-chain result after the trade. This mechanism, protected by zero-knowledge proofs, shields traders from MEV attacks, frontrunning, and sandwich attacks.

Amidst the Binance Meme craze and the privacy narrative overlap, $ASTER itself may still be worth keeping an eye on.

2. Umbra: Auditable Privacy

From October 6-8, the Solana privacy protocol Umbra conducted an ICO on MetaDAO's futarchy platform, originally aiming to raise $750,000 but ultimately raising around $8.8 million, over 1100% above the target.

Umbra's core value lies in providing Solana with a "stealth mode": through on-device encryption and Arcium's Multi-Party Computation (MPC) technology, users can conduct private transfers without sacrificing the blockchain's verifiability and speed.

Unlike the fully anonymous Monero, Umbra incorporates a compliance framework, creating encrypted links between private and public wallets through an auditor program, only disclosing information under a court order. This auditable privacy meets users' needs for financial privacy while avoiding the regulatory risks of Tornado Cash-like solutions.

Currently, privacy projects on Solana are at an early stage compared to Ethereum. Given Solana's reputation for speed and performance, moving towards privacy will inevitably require support from some flagship projects.

Publicly available information indicates that Umbra is set to launch on the Solana mainnet in Q1 2026. If successful, it may attract professional traders in the Solana ecosystem who need to prevent frontrunning, users requiring bank-level confidentiality, and institutions seeking compliant privacy tools.

It is worth mentioning that MetaDAO, the funding platform for Umbra, has seen its own token META rise by around 191% in the past 30 days. This is another topic related to the launchpad mechanism, which we won't dive into due to space constraints.

3. Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku Roadmap: Privacy from Edge to Core

On October 8, the Ethereum Foundation officially released the Kohaku privacy roadmap, marking the first time in Ethereum's history that privacy has been elevated from an "optional feature" to "protocol-level commitment." Kohaku is a modular open-source SDK (Software Development Kit) that provides wallet privacy primitives, allowing developers to easily integrate strong cryptographic functionality. This move was personally endorsed by Vitalik Buterin and established a 47-person Privacy Cluster team to coordinate cross-organizational efforts.

The core features include:

· Lightweight Client: Browser-based validation to avoid revealing IP address through trusted RPC nodes

· Private Transaction Flow: Integration of zk-based protocols like Railgun to achieve confidential sending/receiving

· Social Recovery: Utilizing tools such as ZK Email, ZKpassport to recover wallets without exposing private keys

· App Single Account: Isolating transaction records for different applications to prevent linkage analysis

This is not reinventing the wheel, but rather integrating existing mature privacy solutions (such as Railgun, Elusiv) into a unified SDK to lower the development barrier. Ethereum plans to showcase the initial prototype at Devcon in November 2025 and drive native account abstraction (AA) in 2026, making privacy a "default option" rather than an advanced feature.

The Kohaku roadmap specifically mentions Railgun's zk-multisig feature. As the "officially endorsed" privacy engine, Railgun will gain broader wallet integrations through the Kohaku SDK, which was also one of the significant catalysts for the 270% surge of the RAIL token on October 9.

More broadly, Kohaku represents a fundamental shift in Ethereum's attitude towards privacy, where privacy tokens on Ethereum may experience a wave of short-term speculation.

4. Aztec Mainnet Launching Soon: Telling the Story of L2 Privacy and Decentralization

The Aztec Network is an Ethereum-based privacy-first zero-knowledge rollup L2, raising $1.191 billion (a16z, Paradigm leading), focusing on "programmable privacy" to empower developers to build applications where users control data disclosure.

On September 17, 2025, Aztec deployed the 2.0.3 feature-complete upgrade, signaling that all mainnet-required mechanisms are now in place.

The core distinction of Aztec from other privacy solutions lies in "computational privacy": not only hiding transaction amounts and addresses but also concealing the entire smart contract execution logic. This paves the way for enterprise adoption.

For example, Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization can settle on-chain without exposing transaction strategies, meeting KYC/AML requirements through selective disclosure.

The Aztec roadmap shows that the mainnet Alpha will be launched by the end of 2025, adopting a fully decentralized relayer and validator model without the usual gradual decentralization transition.

This contrasts with most Layer 2 solutions, such as Optimism, which initially have a centralized relayer and some level of compromise on the relayer centralization issue.

While infrastructure may not be a new narrative and the overall crypto market may not necessarily need new L1/L2 solutions, there is still an opportunity to attract some attention and funding in an old race with a unique selling point.

Overall, these projects are mostly in the early stages, but the privacy track is indeed transitioning from a niche demand to a necessary option in mainstream on-chain infrastructure, and localized opportunities may also lie within this quietly evolving landscape.

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