Privacy coins are back on the radar in a big way. Monero and Zcash, the veterans of this niche, have started climbing again as on-chain transaction monitoring ramps up and regulators turn the screws on major exchanges.

Even so, part of the trading crowd is already looking somewhere else on the map: the arrival of an anonymous payments layer built directly on Solana, GhostPay, tied to the GhostWareOS ecosystem and the $GHOST token. With the GhostPay launch now fixed for November 26, traders are no longer just weighing ZEC against XMR. They are also looking at a new Solana-native privacy rail that plugs directly into a smaller-cap token, $GHOST, rather than another standalone L1 privacy coin.

GhostPay: The Center Of The Privacy Battle

GhostWareOS is currently one of the few projects trying to solve privacy directly on Solana, instead of spinning up yet another isolated L1. The protocol works as a privacy layer on top of the network, with modules for aliases (GhostMask), on-chain trail cleaning (GhostScrub), and encrypted message routing (GhostRelay).

At the heart of this stack is GhostPay, a private payment layer that hides the sender, recipient, and amount of Solana transactions using zero-knowledge proofs and hybrid encryption. GhostPay goes live on November 26, 2025, as the first privacy-focused payment layer natively built on Solana.

GHOST is still tiny compared with the older privacy names. As of late November 2025, ZEC and XMR sit on market caps in the region of US$8 billion and US$7 billion, respectively, while GHOST remains under the US$10 million mark, a much lower starting base if demand for a Solana privacy stack accelerates with GhostPay’s launch.

One concrete point of differentiation for GhostPay is its value-capture model. One hundred percent of the fees generated by GhostPay are directed back to $GHOST holders, with permanent multipliers for early adopters.

On top of that, the payments infrastructure will be powered by the HoudiniSwap backend, one of the leading private swap services, which means a share of the anonymous transaction flow from other networks can be routed through the GhostWareOS layer.

Performance spreads widen as GHOST separates from XMR and ZEC following the GhostPay confirmation.

XMR Price: Steady Recovery In A More Mature Market

Monero’s architecture makes address-level tracing extremely difficult and keeps the asset’s fungibility high. That is a big part of why XMR remains relevant even as newer privacy layers arrive.

The XMR price has been in a recovery trend in 2025. Data from CoinMarketCap shows the Monero price trading today in the $386 to $387 range, with a market cap of around $7.1 billion and daily volume above $170 million.

At the same time, this is happening in an asset whose circulating supply is already close to its historical peak and which has a firmly established presence on major centralized exchanges, factors that tend to smooth out extreme moves.

Within that backdrop, Monero price reacts more to market cycles, regulatory pressure, and protocol-specific technical events than to new products that could radically change its usage curve. That is one reason some traders have started to look at lower-cap alternatives such as GHOST.

ZEC Price: Strong Rally, But Signs Of Short-Term Exhaustion

Zcash has followed a slightly different path. The protocol combines transparent addresses similar to Bitcoin’s with shielded addresses that use zk-SNARKs to hide sender, recipient, and amount, letting users choose between transparency and privacy.

After months of relatively low liquidity, the ZEC price entered an aggressive rally in 2025. It jumped by roughly 125 percent in a single month alongside higher miner revenue and hashrate hitting all-time highs. Today, CoinMarketCap shows the Zcash price around $504, with a market cap of $8.2 billion.

In relative terms, the ZEC price still trades below the peaks of past cycles, but a good part of the recent optimism around the asset and the classic privacy coin narrative already appears to be priced in. When you compare it with other projects such as GHOST, it becomes clear that the room for market cap expansion in Zcash is more limited than in a newly launched Solana microcap.

Conclusion

With GhostPay confirmed for November 26, the privacy crypto market is entering an interesting phase. XMR price and Zcash price are already trading at elevated levels, while a new anonymous layer is trying to capture day-to-day payment flows on one of the most active networks for DeFi and memecoins.

For those who believe the next stage of privacy will be driven more by payment layers and metadata tools than by base-layer coins alone, GHOST and GhostPay may deserve a place on the watchlist.

This article contains information about a cryptocurrency presale. Crypto Economy is not associated with the project. As with any initiative within the crypto ecosystem, we encourage users to do their own research before participating, carefully considering both the potential and the risks involved. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

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Filed under: News - @ November 25, 2025 4:30 pm