Recently I bought several 5x-raising projects in the secondary market, such as $hype and $blue. I bought higher and higher, which brought me huge profits.
Which brings me to the realization – copycat season may be here soon.
From the perspective of Altcoin Season, 67% of the top 50 tokens in the past 90 days outperformed Bitcoin. If the proportion reaches 75%, it means that the cryptocurrency market has officially entered the Altcoin Season.
Judging from the curve, the market conducted its first test from December 1st to 8th, and entered a stage of adjustment after falling back after December 9th. The market is currently accumulating strength and it is estimated that the adjustment will be completed soon, followed by the counterfeit explosion season.
At this time we should be adequately prepared: investigate in advance, ambush at a low point, and then wait for the wind to come.
Among altcoins, apart from Defi, the most popular among capital and big players is the privacy project. This track has been rising quietly, so much so that many people don’t even know the existence of this track. For example, Zcash has risen 56% in the past 30 days.
So today let’s talk about why we should pay attention to the privacy track.
This article is divided into the following aspects:
Why does the privacy track exist?
10 privacy projects compared
What are the innovations of Mystiko?
What are the opportunities at Mystiko?
1. Why does the privacy track exist?
The transparency of blockchain is a double-edged sword. The transaction activities and balances of users on the chain are transparent. Although the real entities of the on-chain accounts are anonymous, the transaction data of their accounts is almost completely transparent. If your on-chain address happens to have interacted with a platform that requires KYC, such as CEX, then all your assets on the chain are exposed. Even if you use a DEX such as Uniswap, you will still be exposed.
Web3 is highly related to assets and the chain is highly transparent, which leads to a big problem. If people are interested, it is easy to track these transactions. A typical case is:
3AC once confidently disclosed some addresses to prove their super strength in the cryptocurrency circle;
However, unfortunately, they encountered the LUNA incident. In the LUNA incident, some people tracked the 3AC address, and a large amount of reverse operations flowed in in an instant, which eventually accelerated the liquidation of 3AC.
In addition, there is the FTX incident. The FTX incident has exacerbated people’s distrust of CEX. In order to rebuild market confidence, CEX must disclose its assets more transparently than before, but many users and institutions do not want their account balances to be made public.
At this time, the market needs privacy projects, whether it is hiding addresses or hiding transactions, as long as they are not "naked" on the chain.
So when Monero and ZCash first came out, they were favored by VCs, miners, and big players. It was not until Tornado Cash was banned that people really realized that the market needed more privacy projects to provide services.
The current solution on the market is to use zk-SNARKs to improve the privacy of encrypted assets, storing the user's balance in a Merkle tree or KZG commitment, which not only protects the user's privacy but also effectively discloses the user's asset status. The encrypted assets that adopt this solution are called "privacy tokens". From 2013 to now, this type of privacy tokens include:
Zcash (ZEC)
Verge (XVG)
Monero (XMR)
Dash (DASH)
Beam (BEAM)
Horizen (ZEN)
Bytecoin (BCN)
The cryptocurrency industry advocates investing in new projects rather than old ones. Finding new projects and projects that have not been hyped up can increase investors' chances of winning. Therefore, this article will no longer analyze those old privacy projects. Here we have found 10 representative projects for comparison.
2. Comparison of ten privacy projects
Privacy projects are mainly created to meet the needs of users who value anonymity, and are generally used to protect data, addresses, transaction records, amounts or files, etc. The concept of privacy was first introduced by Monero. In the 10 years since the launch of $xmr, the token has risen by 8601%, creating huge wealth for countless miners.
Inspired by Monero, developers have tried various methods to develop privacy coins in the past 10 years. The most famous one is Zcash, which uses ZKP technology to hide transaction addresses, thereby hiding the sender and receiver of funds and protecting user privacy. In 2020, it was decided to allocate 20% of the ZEC network mining rewards to the ZCash Foundation to operate the project. However, some participants were dissatisfied with this and created a forked chain ZCL.
The disunity in the Zcash community has brought great opportunities to the privacy sector. Many projects have been created after the developers left, including:
Currently, most solutions use ZKP technology to encrypt users' transaction information to protect user privacy.
In the past 30 days, the privacy sector has risen by 50% overall, and $mask and $xzk have risen by 35% . $mask belongs to social privacy. This article mainly discusses infrastructure projects, so Mystiko will be introduced in detail.
3. What are the innovations of Mystiko?
Among many privacy projects, Tornado Cash was widely used around the world before it was banned in August 22.
The mechanism of Tornado Cash is very simple. It adopts the mixer mode, allowing users to deposit ETH, DAI, USDC and other ERC-20 tokens and withdraw them from different other encrypted addresses. In terms of technology, it uses ZK technology to encrypt the depositor's wallet address and mix it with the wallet addresses of other users who deposited the same token, making it difficult for outsiders to track the whereabouts of the funds.
Since Tornado Cash is deployed on Ethereum, BSC, Polygon and Optimism Network, it meets most EVM address requirements, which is very similar to the cross-chain privacy model, but it has a disadvantage that the gas fee is too high. Even so, before being sanctioned, Tornado Cash had about $8 billion in transactions. It can be seen that the market has a substantial demand for cross-chain privacy.
1. Mystiko Background
Under strong market demand, Mystiko Network has launched the Mystiko Protocal based on zk-snarks after 2 years of development. It has an easy-to-insert technical protocol that can be integrated into almost all major cross-chain bridges in the Web3 ecosystem. This makes Mystiko one of the few cross-chain privacy projects currently.
With such a novel concept and market demand, Mystiko Network received $30 million in financing led by Sequoia Capital in the private round of financing in March 2024. Participants included: Amazon Next, HashKey, Mirana, Signum, Coinlist, Naval Ravikant, Sandeep Nailwal, Gokul Rajaram, Tribe Capital, Morningstar Ventures and other investors.
Let’s take a look at how Mystiko is played.
2. Introduction to Mystiko
Mystiko Network is the zero-knowledge (ZK) technology layer of Web3, providing privacy protocols and ZK software development kits to ensure scalability, compatibility, and permissioned privacy for projects using Layer 1, Layer 2, wallets, cross-chain, etc.
Ordinary users only need to use Mystiko's one-click wallet to manage and transfer their assets between complex blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Avalanche, Polkadot, Near, Solana, etc., and only need to pay a small gas fee.
Many people may think that Mystiko Network is going to build another L1 or L2 after seeing this. It should be noted here that Mystiko Network, as a privacy technology provider, is not a Layer 1 or Layer 2 platform, nor does it belong to any ecosystem. It is a package of privacy technology services. Any project that requires user privacy can use Mystiko's SDK toolkit to integrate Mystiko into the protocol. This is the "hot plug" function mentioned above.
Projects using Mystiko’s privacy SDK tools, such as Camo Wallet (wallet), Cable (bridge), Ninja (payments), Wizard (DEX).
In addition, it also supports cross-chain communication protocols such as LayerZero, Axelar, and Celer, and provides toolkits to build completely anonymous cross-chain transfer products.
3. What products does Mystiko Network have?
Mystiko Network's most basic product is the Privacy SDK toolkit, which helps chains, bridges, wallets, and dApps integrate privacy with ZK technology.
The first project developed based on this technology is Camo Wallet. Users can store assets, transactions, and cross-chain transfers completely anonymously in this wallet. Thanks to the ZK-SNARK proof generated by Mystiko for each transaction, Camo Wallet is highly anonymous and secure.
In terms of compatibility, users can use public wallets such as Metamask to transfer or withdraw funds through Camo Wallet.
4. What is the application of Mystiko Network?
According to official information, Mystiko products can be applied in the following situations:
Cross-chain transfer: This is the core function of Mystiko, where users deposit assets on one chain and withdraw funds from another chain without exposing any transaction details.
MystikoPay: Fully on-chain payment, no one can see the user's payment history. All payment history is private, which is particularly useful for companies and merchants to prevent sensitive business income details from being exposed on the chain.
Secret Vault: Users can transfer assets to a completely secret and extremely secure address with complete privacy. Any wallet can provide such functionality to users by implementing the Mystiko Wallet SDK.
Private DEX: Users can trade on private DEXs just like they do on Uniswap while protecting their financial privacy. DEXs can now add such functionality to users by implementing the Mystiko protocol.
(V) Project data
According to the data, the project supports more than $272 million in transaction volume on 6 unique blockchains: Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Linea, and Base. It has generated more than $5 million in fee income for hundreds of ZK-Rollup miners and relayers within the network.
Okay, that’s all the project information is introduced here. The focus of this article is still on whether we can make money.
4. What opportunities are there in Mystiko?
Mystiko is a benchmark for cross-chain privacy. The total amount of the token $XZK is 1 billion, the private placement price is $0.09, the public offering price is $0.15, and the listing price is $0.27.
The current market price is $0.03713, which is nearly 3 times lower than the private placement round price.
FDV is 37.55 million USD, which is the token with the smallest market value and the smallest increase among the top ten privacy projects. Other privacy projects have issued tokens 2 years ago and have completed at least one increase cycle. $XZK TGE on June 18, the token price has not exceeded the private placement round since July. After such a long period of wash trading, retail investors no longer have much holdings, and all airdrops have been issued.
Judging from the on-chain data, large investors seem to be accumulating funds in the past week, and their holdings have increased by 0.09%. This may be waiting for market benefits, such as token destruction or other incentive activities.
Currently ranked around 1100th in terms of market capitalization, the token price is severely undervalued. With the advent of the altcoin season, the profit potential is huge.
Like Chainlink in its early stages, XZK has grown steadily under difficult conditions. With strong partnerships and a reliable V2 SDK, it is well positioned to gain significant value when the market recovers.
Historically, privacy coins such as ZCash and XZK have been subject to regulatory scrutiny. However, Tornado Cash’s recent victory against OFAC and Trump’s crypto-friendly policies could significantly boost these coins.
