Privacy — long treated as a secondary design choice in blockchain systems — is poised to become the primary battleground between networks by 2026, according to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm.
Rather than throughput or transaction costs, privacy is now emerging as the factor most likely to determine which blockchains achieve real-world adoption and durable network effects.
Key takeaways
a16z crypto argues privacy will be the main differentiator between blockchains by 2026.
Transaction speed and fees are no longer meaningful competitive advantages.
Lack of privacy remains a major barrier to bringing global finance fully onchain.
Privacy-first networks could concentrate most real-world blockchain activity.
Ali Yahya noted the absence of robust privacy remains one of the core reasons onchain systems have failed to replace traditional financial infrastructure. Despite years of development, most blockchains still expose sensitive transaction data in ways that make them unsuitable for everyday commercial, institutional, and personal use.
Yahya’s argument rests on a broader shift in blockchain competition. Performance metrics such as speed and fees have largely converged across major networks, stripping them of long-term differentiation power. Privacy, by contrast, remains rare, difficult to implement correctly, and increasingly valuable.
Why privacy creates stronger network effects
Unlike assets, secrets do not move easily between blockchains. While tokens can be bridged in minutes, transferring private data without leakage is far more complex. Even when balances are hidden, metadata such as transaction timing and size can still reveal sensitive information, enabling surveillance or targeted attacks.
This friction gives privacy a compounding advantage. Once users conduct sensitive activity on a privacy-preserving network, switching becomes costly. Yahya described this dynamic as a “privacy network effect,” where trust and usage reinforce one another, potentially concentrating economic activity into a small number of privacy-centric chains.
The implication is uncomfortable for general-purpose blockchains. As blockspace becomes abundant and costs trend toward zero, networks without strong privacy guarantees, distribution advantages, or deeply embedded ecosystems may steadily lose relevance.
Privacy beyond blockchains
The debate is expanding beyond financial transactions. Shane Mac, co-founder and CEO of XMTP Labs, warned that future secure communication will require both encryption and decentralization. With advances in quantum computing on the horizon, encryption alone is insufficient if messaging relies on centralized servers that can be compromised, coerced, or shut down.
That view sparked controversy, prompting Yahya to underline a key distinction: centralized private systems require users to “trust” operators, while decentralized protocols eliminate that dependency entirely. Open systems, he argued, give users direct control over identities, data, and communications without relying on intermediaries.
A similar perspective was offered by Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer of Mysten Labs. He noted that sectors such as healthcare and finance require granular control over who can access confidential data, under what conditions, and for how long.
Without native privacy and programmable access controls, organizations are forced into centralized architectures or custom-built solutions that slow collaboration and increase operational risk. Abiodun suggested that with decentralized key management, client-side encryption, and onchain permissions, “secrets” themselves could become a core primitive of the internet.
Taken together, the message from a16z crypto and industry builders is clear: the next phase of blockchain adoption will be shaped less by raw performance and more by information control. As onchain systems edge closer to mainstream use, privacy is no longer optional — it is becoming foundational infrastructure.
