When we talk about a narrative in crypto it is more about an idea or technology that is trending which helps shape the markets in which way they are heading. The privacy narrative is an interesting one when you look on a quick Google search very little is mentioned yet it is probably the most important technology for crypto to be adopted. Privacy is the link required between a real world use case and crypto/blockchains making adoption happen.
Any institution or business wanting to transact online using crypto as a payment does not want the transparency of the blockchain showing everyone what they are doing. This information needs to be protected and until that technology had been developed there was never going to be any crypto adoption taking place.
A few weeks ago (3or4) Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum mentioned the importance of privacy and that this technology needed to be incorporated for the blockchain to grow. Privacy is a must have technology that without this crypto is going nowhere. From digital payments, trading, real world assets , medical records to name a few as the list is endless where privacy through protecting your data is required.
I have been following the privacy narrative very closely mainly as I am invested in COTI which has developed Garbled Circuits and is leading the privacy tech. COTI this year became an L2 token on Ethereum moving away from the COTI DAG. There are other crypto's involved in privacy like ZCash , but they do not offer the same tech as COTI so this will be interesting to see how the markets react this cycle.
I am sure many of you have seen Zcash (ZEC) pumping in the last day or two, but you would be mistaken if you thought it would be going on to achieve an ATH this cycle. ZCash even after this pump of 300% plus is still down nearly 96% from it's ATH.
Way back in 2016 ZCash had achieved over $3K so this is proper diamond hands if you held onto these tokens as we are talking 9 years of very little market movement.
I would suggest back in 2016 this privacy technology was ahead of it's time as there were so few real world use cases ready and the market did not understand what this tech really meant. The problem for ZCash now is they have a crypto competitor who offers far more than what they offer. ZCash uses ZK-SNARK technology and wanted to highlight it does have short comings when compared to Garbled Circuits which is the COTI privacy technology.
This above comparison chart is taken from the COTI White Paper and why I am bullish on COTI leading the narrative this cycle as there is no one better equipped to handle privacy than COTI. This is why the team was invited to assist with the Digital Euro with regard to privacy and there will be many others asking for help.
Perpetual trading using privacy is growing and later this month anyone could send their own minted private stable coin on Metamask to someone else in total privacy. Over the next few weeks there will be many announcements and this will catch peoples attention. This privacy area is evolving and developing so fast out of need so we have no idea what is going to happen next.
The way I see things if ZCash can rise by 300% within a day then I see no reason why COTI won't do very well when the privacy narrative starts to gather momentum. This is not an if or a maybe, but more of a when as this is going to happen.