Recently, industry veterans raised a thought-provoking point at an international conference: the development of the crypto industry is entering its third stage—the privacy stage.

This judgment is worth pondering. Looking back at the evolution of the crypto market, the first stage was the decentralized consensus verification pioneered by Bitcoin, which solved the trust problem. The second stage, with the emergence of Ethereum, saw the explosion of smart contracts and the DeFi ecosystem, focusing on expanding application scenarios. The third stage points to privacy, which makes logical sense— as more users participate in on-chain transactions, privacy protection becomes a rigid demand.

From the current situation, while the transparency of public chains brings security and auditability, it also exposes user behavior information. For institutions and large holders, privacy is a practical need; for ordinary users, privacy is a fundamental right. This perhaps explains why privacy coins and privacy protocols continue to have vitality.

However, balancing privacy and regulatory compliance is always a challenge. Whether the industry can find solutions that address both will determine how far the third stage can go.