Solid breakdown, but there’s a glaring omission here. Miden isn’t on this list, and it probably should be sitting above all four. Here’s why. Monero’s privacy relies on ring signatures and stealth addresses. It’s battle-tested, yes, but the cryptography is not quantum-resistant. Researchers have already demonstrated timing and heuristic attacks that can partially de-anonymize transactions. The privacy is probabilistic, not provable. You’re trusting obfuscation, not mathematics. Zcash improved on that by introducing zk-SNARKs, which gave you cryptographic proof of privacy rather than just obscuring links. But the elephant in the room is the trusted setup. The original ceremony required participants to honestly destroy toxic waste. If even one party kept it, the entire shielding system is compromised. That is not a theoretical concern. It is a structural one baked into the foundation. Miden flips the model entirely. It uses STARKs, not SNARKs. No trusted setup. No toxic waste. The proofs are transparent and verifiable by anyone. And because STARKs rely on hash functions rather than elliptic curve cryptography, Miden is post-quantum secure by design, something neither Monero nor Zcash can claim. Beyond cryptography, Miden runs a client-side proving architecture. Your transaction is proven on your own device before it ever touches the network. The chain never sees your data. That is not the same as hiding data after the fact. That is privacy at the execution layer. Add programmable compliance through ZK proofs, smart contract composability, and institutional-grade tooling through Miden Guardian, and you have a privacy protocol built for where crypto is actually going, not where it has been. A post about privacy projects in 2025 without mentioning @0xMiden is incomplete.