The collective "resurrection" of old coins like DASH, ZEC, and ICP—Is it a sign of capital nostalgia or a new narrative?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily Dingdang

In the past few days, the market has continued to weaken, yet a group of "old coins" has risen against the trend, sparking a frenzy on their own.

As mainstream narratives grow increasingly tired, these long-forgotten names have reappeared at the top of the gainers list. They are not the creators of new stories, but they shine once again amidst the ruins of the old era. Some see it as the "return of veterans," while others believe it is merely a momentary curiosity of new funds. Regardless, during a phase of low liquidity and scarce hotspots, the unexpected excitement of old projects has become a mirror reflecting market sentiment.

DASH, ZK: The Rotation Game of Privacy Funds

Privacy coins are undoubtedly the core engine of this market wave. After ZEC skyrocketed 40 times in a month, the market found itself in a dilemma—afraid to chase further, yet unwilling to miss out. Thus, funds began to rotate among similar themes, with XMR, DASH, ZK, MINA, and others making the list. For more on the logic behind ZEC's rise, see “The Revival of Privacy Coins: From Binance Delisting Candidates to a 13-Fold Surge, ZEC's Lightning Rebirth”.

DASH (Digital Cash)'s story dates back to 2014. Originally named "Darkcoin," it was created by Evan Duffield and achieved optional privacy through CoinJoin mixing technology, positioning itself as "digital cash." Although both Dash and Zcash center around privacy payments, their design philosophies, technical routes, privacy strengths, governance methods, and practical uses are entirely different.

Dash was born even before Zcash; the former emphasizes "fast payments + optional privacy + on-chain governance," sacrificing some privacy for speed, governance, and real merchant adoption, making it suitable for everyday small payments. The latter, however, emphasizes absolute privacy protection, pursuing mathematically absolute privacy at the cost of speed, usability, and merchant acceptance, primarily used for large private transfers.

The differences in their positioning also determine their respective user groups. Dash still has thousands of real merchants in Venezuela and Colombia, and the DashPay wallet (username payments) has been launched; Zcash has almost zero real merchants, with 90% of its trading volume coming from exchange arbitrage or the dark web. It is precisely because of its extreme pursuit of privacy protection that its space for survival has been sharply compressed under regulatory pressure.

If DASH is the "realist" of privacy coins, then ZEC is the "idealist." One compromises with life, while the other remains loyal to mathematics.

As for ZK (ZKsync), it represents the "Ethereum re-narrative" of the zero-knowledge track. ZKsync primarily achieves high throughput and privacy protection through zero-knowledge proof (ZK-Rollup) technology and is seen as an important solution for Ethereum scaling.

On November 1, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin praised ZKsync for its "quiet but valuable contribution to the Ethereum ecosystem." This tweet acted as a signal flare, and in the atmosphere of rekindled privacy narratives, ZK became the focus, with short-term gains exceeding 160%.

Although there was a subsequent pullback, on the evening of November 4, ZKsync founder Alex released the "ZK Token Proposal Part I," proposing a significant update to the ZK token economic model: all network revenue will be used to repurchase and burn ZK tokens, transforming it from a purely governance token into an asset with value capture functionality.

Currently, the privacy sector remains a hotspot for fund chasing, with projects like SCRT and ROSE being re-examined due to the new narrative combining privacy computing with AI. It can be said that in the crevice of the game between regulation and freedom, the privacy sector has become the "emotional outlet" for market funds. It is both a refuge and a speculation.

ICP, AR: The Old Dream of the Storage Track Reignited

ICP (Internet Computer) was founded by genius scientist Dominic Williams in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2016, led by the DFINITY Foundation, and officially launched its mainnet on May 10, 2021. Its ultimate vision is to completely replace centralized cloud services like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure with a public chain, turning the entire internet into a "world computer."

At that time, Internet Computer conducted multiple rounds of private placements, raising approximately $163-195 million, with a valuation once reaching $9.5 billion. This was second only to Polkadot among blockchain projects at the time, making it the second-highest funded L1 public chain in history, truly a "king-level" project, with a financing lineup that included well-known crypto investment institutions like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Polychain, and Multicoin.

However, the ideal was too grand, and reality was too complex. The project reached a peak of $2,800 upon launch, then quickly fell back to around $300, a drop of up to 90%. Over four years, its valuation plummeted from $9.5 billion to a current market cap of $42 million, which is quite lamentable. The token hit a low of $1.86 during the massive crash on October 10, then surged 5 times within a month, peaking at $9.84.

AR (Arweave) is a permanent data storage protocol founded by Sam Williams in 2017 and launched in 2018, positioned as "Permaweb" (permanent web). Its core selling point is one-time payment for permanent storage, addressing issues of data loss and censorship. Arweave abandoned the linear structure of traditional blockchains and created a unique "Blockweave" data structure, where miners must not only store new data but also randomly prove their access to historical old data through the Proof of Access (PoA) mechanism to earn mining rewards. This economic incentive addresses the challenge of long-term data preservation on the blockchain.

In February 2025, the AO mainnet was officially launched, marking a historic leap for Arweave from "permanent storage" to "permanent computation." Before AO launched, Arweave was often defined by the market as "expensive cold storage." Although it achieved true "one-time payment for permanent preservation," its application scenarios were mainly concentrated in "write once, read rarely" cold data fields like NFT metadata backup, archives, and mirror sites. The emergence of AO has propelled Arweave's narrative upgrade, shifting it from "storage" to "computation + AI."

However, on the market level, its price has long been sluggish. After reaching a peak of $90 during the 2021 bull market, AR's price has remained stagnant between $5 and $15, far behind cheaper competitors like Filecoin and Irys. In 2024, driven by market sentiment and the AO narrative, it once rebounded to $50. Now, it is once again hovering around $5; can it replicate the trend of 2024 and embark on a rebound?

DCR: The Undervalued Governance Textbook

Decred (DCR) is one of the earliest and most successful "on-chain autonomous organization" (DAO) projects in the cryptocurrency field, founded by former Bitcoin developer Jake Yocom-Piatt and launched on February 8, 2016. Decred was created to address Bitcoin's biggest pain point—governance rigidity. It uses a unique hybrid PoW+PoS consensus, allowing holders rather than miners to dominate changes in network rules, budget allocation, and future direction. Specifically, PoW miners are responsible for block production, while PoS stakeholders are responsible for validating blocks and voting. Any rule changes require 75% approval to prevent miner dictatorship or hard forks.

There are many public chain projects like Decred that operate based on Bitcoin code forks. Before 2021, the crypto industry’s exploration of blockchain was largely an attempt to patch its existing flaws outside the framework of Bitcoin using different technological paths. After the emergence of DeFi Summer, these projects gradually faded into obscurity, with DCR's price hovering between $10 and $30 for years.

Conclusion: The Resurrection of Old Gods or the Echo of Illusions?

In terms of short-term prices, the rebounds of these old projects are mostly accompanied by pullbacks. After a brief frenzy, the market returns to a calm risk-testing phase. Whether they can withstand this test will determine if they replicate ZEC's miracle or reenact a fleeting illusion.

A deeper reality is: the current crypto market is scarce in new narratives and tightening in liquidity. The "resurrection" of old coins is more like a nostalgic behavior when funds have nowhere to go, a brief reflection on the early "idealist era" of crypto.

Perhaps investors do not truly believe these old projects will "reborn," but at least, these names remind them that the crypto market once had faith.

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