The post Most Influential 2025’s Honorable Mentions appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

The cryptocurrency industry is ever-growing and ever-changing, and it’s difficult to summarize the year’s zeitgeist with 50 names alone. To wrap up CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 series, we’re giving an honorable mention to a final slate of nominees, recognizing stories that really took off in the closing months of the year or who were on the cusp of making the list. These names spring from growing segments of the industry like prediction markets, resurging areas like privacy and the well-established companies and personalities. Privacy, including coins like Zcash and networks like Canton Privacy has long been a concern for the crypto industry, with privacy coins, mixers and other tools intended to help participants transact without sharing all of their private details. Industry participants and even the likes of federal regulators like U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins are discussing the importance of privacy in crypto transactions. More recently, Zcash (ZCH) in particular has seen a resurgence, with the Zashi wallet making shielded — i.e., private — transactions the default and larger investors pouring funds into the network’s tokens. “The future of privacy is like the past … in the United States that I was born into, and the whole world where everyone lived, you could have a conversation with someone. It’s just between you and them,” said Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox in an interview with CoinDesk Podcasts. “You don’t have to worry about if someone else is lurking or eavesdropping on you. And the same with financial transactions, you go to the store and you buy something and you pay them, and that’s just between you and them. There’s no one else who has any visibility or control over what you buy and when. Zcash implements that same mechanism using cryptography for the internet, but it’s really just…

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Filed under: News - @ December 20, 2025 1:29 am