The privacy sector is the best performing sector of the week. It's also the sector with the highest increase in mindshare in the last 2 days. Here are the latest News from Privacy sector: TLDR from Dexu AI on privacy: Privacy szn is in full swing, thanks to new technological advancements, growing institutional interest, and increasing concerns over digital surveillance. This trend is seen as a return to crypto's cypherpunk roots, emphasizing user sovereignty and freedom from centralized control. Projects like Zcash, @RAILGUN_Project , @AleoHQ , @BeldexCoin , and new Ethereum Foundation initiatives (Kohaku, FHE advancements) are leading the charge. The narrative is shifting from privacy as a niche feature to a fundamental requirement for mainstream crypto adoption, especially for DeFi, institutional finance, and AI, against a backdrop of increasing digital surveillance and regulatory scrutiny. The focus is on making privacy both powerful and user-friendly, ensuring it's "normal and for everyone." Let's now dive deeper. Few updates on privacy coins Zcash, Monero, Aleo and Beldex. Verifiable AI and Data Privacy: The growing intersection of AI and crypto is leading to increased demand for privacy-preserving AI. Projects like @nillionnetwork and @zama_fhe (with its HPU) are working on enabling AI models to train and compute on encrypted data, ensuring data sovereignty and verifiable integrity. Decentralized Identity (DeID) & Privacy Projects like @idOS_network are tackling the issue of identity chaos in Web3. idOS is building a portable, encrypted identity layer that allows users to verify once and reuse credentials across various dApps and chains, with self-custody and privacy by design. This addresses "KYC fatigue" while enabling compliant DeFi without doxing users. Ethereum Ecosystem: The EF has launched a "Privacy Cluster" with 47 top researchers and engineers, demonstrating a strong commitment to integrating privacy features directly into the L1 network. Key developments include: 1. Kohaku: An SDK and reference wallet (not a consumer app) spearheaded by Vitalik Buterin, aiming to provide a full-stack privacy and security solution for EVM wallets. It integrates with projects like Railgun for private sending and receiving, and explores features like per-dApp accounts and ZK-based recovery. 2. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE): Projects like Zama and @FhenixIO are making significant strides in FHE, enabling computations on encrypted data without decrypting it. This breakthrough is crucial for confidential DeFi (private DEXs, lending), private AI, and compliant smart contracts at scale. Zama has achieved sub-millisecond bootstrapping and 230 TPS for confidential stablecoins, outperforming many L1s in privacy-preserving transactions. Fhenix's Threshold FHE Decryption significantly lowers latency and boosts throughput for decryption operations. 3. ZK-Proofs: Widely recognized as foundational for both scalability and privacy, ZKPs are being integrated across various Ethereum-based projects to enable verifiable yet confidential transactions and data processing. Solana Ecosystem Solana is also seeing a push for privacy with projects like @UmbraPrivacy (built on @ArciumHQ 's encrypted compute) offering private swaps and transfers. The goal is to bring confidentiality to Solana's high-speed and composable DeFi landscape.