Cryptocurrency was supposed to be about privacy. It's right there in the prefix "crypto" (meaning "hidden" or "secret"), a nickname the technology shares with cryptography, the discipline that spawned it.

Yet, 13 years later, while bitcoin and its various knockoffs and descendants have become a $2 trillion asset class, privacy remains hard to come by, for cryptocurrency users and everyday people alike.

From the Bitcoin blockchain's Taproot upgrade to alternative privacy coins to innovations like mixers and zero-knowledge proofs, various communities are working to restore crypto's original, namesake promise – even as international regulators demand the collection and sharing of ever more data. Outside cryptocurrency, activists are fighting to claw back long-lost privacy for internet users broadly, whether through tech tools, legal reforms or some combination.

CoinDesk's Privacy Week is a collection of articles that explores this battleground from a range of perspectives – technological, regulatory and societal. We take stock of the state of online privacy in 2022 in crypto and beyond, and where it might be headed in the years and decades to come.

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Chelsea Manning on the Sad State of Online Privacy

"I have zero hope at a policy level," says the whistleblower turned security consultant. "This is a cultural issue." This interview is part of CoinDesk's Privacy Week.

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