The revival of old coins like DASH, ZEC, and ICP collectively, is it a nostalgia of capital or a precursor to a new narrative?

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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 become increasingly stale, these long-forgotten names reappear at the top of the gainers list. They are not the creators of new stories, yet they shine again amid the ruins of the old era. Some view this as a “return of the veterans,” while others believe it is merely a momentary curiosity from new capital. Regardless, during a phase of low liquidity and lack of hotspots, the unexpected excitement of old projects has already become a mirror reflecting market sentiment.

DASH, ZK: The Rotating Game of Privacy Funds

Privacy coins are undoubtedly the core engine of this market trend. After ZEC skyrocketed 40 times within a month, the market fell into a dilemma—hesitant to chase further yet unwilling to miss out. As a result, funds began to rotate among similar themes, with XMR, DASH, ZK, MINA, and others making the list. The logic behind ZEC's rise can be further explored in the article “The Revival of Privacy Coins: From Binance Delisting Candidate to 13 Times Surge, The Lightning Resurrection of ZEC.”

The story of DASH (Digital Cash) dates back to 2014. It was originally named “Darkcoin” and was created by Evan Duffield. It achieved optional privacy through CoinJoin mixing technology and is positioned as “digital cash.” Although both Dash and Zcash focus on privacy payments, their design philosophies, technical paths, privacy strengths, governance methods, and actual uses are completely different.

Dash was born even earlier than 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 emphasizes absolute privacy protection, pursuing a mathematically absolute level of privacy but sacrificing speed, usability, and merchant acceptance, mainly used for large privacy transfers.

The differences in positioning between the two also determine the different groups that adopt them. Dash still has thousands of real merchants in Venezuela and Colombia, and the DashPay wallet (username payment) has also been launched; the number of real merchants for Zcash is almost zero, with 90% of the trading volume coming from exchange arbitrage or the dark web. It is precisely because of its extreme pursuit of privacy protection that its living space 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 is loyal to mathematics.

As for ZK (ZKsync), it represents the “Ethereum re-narrative” of the zero-knowledge track. ZKsync mainly achieves high throughput and privacy protection through zero-knowledge proof (ZK-Rollup) technology, and is regarded as an important solution for Ethereum scalability.

On November 1st, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted to praise ZKsync as “a low-key but valuable contribution to the Ethereum ecosystem.” This tweet acted like a flare, and amidst the renewed atmosphere of privacy narratives, ZK became the focus, with a short-term increase of over 160%.

Although there was a subsequent decline, on the evening of November 4th, 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 destroy ZK tokens, transforming them from merely governance tokens into assets with value capture functions.

Currently, the privacy sector remains a hot spot for capital chasing, with projects like SCRT and ROSE being reexamined due to the new narrative of combining privacy computing with AI. It can be said that in the gap between regulation and freedom, the privacy sector has become an “emotional outlet” for market funds. It serves as both a refuge and speculation.

ICP, AR: The Old Dream of the Storage Track is Rekindled

ICP (Internet Computer) was founded by genius scientist Dominic Williams in Zurich, Switzerland in 2016, developed under the leadership of the DFINITY Foundation, and officially launched on the 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 blockchain, turning the entire internet into a “world computer.”

In those years, Internet Computer conducted multiple rounds of private funding, raising approximately $163-195 million, with a valuation peaking at $9.5 billion. At that time, it was second only to Polkadot among blockchain projects, making it the second highest-funded L1 public chain in history, a truly “king-level” project. The financing lineup included well-known crypto investment institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Polychain, and Multicoin.

But the ideal is too grand, and the reality is too complex. The project reached a peak of 2800 USD when it launched, then quickly fell back to around 300 USD, with a decline of up to 90%. After 4 years, it has shrunk from a valuation of 9.5 billion USD to a market value of 42 million USD today, which is quite lamentable. The token hit a low of 1.86 USD during the massive crash on October 10, and within a month, it increased fivefold, reaching a high of 9.84 USD.

AR (Arweave) is a permanent data storage protocol founded by Sam Williams in 2017 and launched in 2018, positioning itself as the “Permaweb”. Its core selling point is one-time payment for permanent storage, addressing issues of data loss and censorship. Arweave abandons the linear structure of traditional blockchains and creates a unique “Blockweave” data structure. Miners must not only store new data through the Proof of Access (PoA) mechanism but also randomly prove their ability to access historical old data to earn mining rewards. Through this economic incentive, it solves the challenge of long-term data preservation in blockchains.

In February 2025, the AO mainnet officially launched, marking a historic leap for Arweave from “permanent storage” to “permanent computing.” Before AO went live, Arweave had been defined by the market as “expensive cold storage.” Although it achieved true “one-time payment, permanent preservation,” its application scenarios were primarily focused on areas of “write once, read seldom” cold data, such as NFT metadata backup, archives, mirror websites, etc. The emergence of AO has propelled the narrative upgrade of Arweave, shifting it from “storage” to “computation + AI.”

However, at the market level, its price has been sluggish for a long time. After reaching a high of 90 USD during the bull market in 2021, the price of AR has remained stagnant between 5-15 USD for a long time, far behind cheaper competitors like Filecoin and Irys in market capitalization. In 2024, driven by a combination of market sentiment and the AO narrative, it once rebounded to 50 USD. Now, it is hovering around 5 USD again. Will it be able to replicate the trends of 2024 and experience another rebound?

DCR: An Underrated Governance Textbook

Decred (DCR) is one of the earliest and most successful “on-chain autonomous organization” (DAO) projects in the cryptocurrency space, founded by former Bitcoin developer Jake Yocom-Piatt, and launched on the mainnet on February 8, 2016. The emergence of Decred is aimed at addressing Bitcoin's biggest pain point—governance rigidity. It achieves this through a unique hybrid PoW+PoS consensus, allowing holders rather than miners to dominate changes to network rules, budget allocation, and future direction. Specifically, PoW miners are responsible for block creation, 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 quite a few public chain projects that operate based on Bitcoin code forks, such as Decred. Before 2021, the exploration of blockchain in the crypto industry was primarily 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 from the spotlight, lost in the passage of time, and the price of DCR has remained sideways between $10 and $30 for many years.

Conclusion: The revival of the old gods, or the echoes of an illusion?

From a short-term price perspective, the rebounds of these old projects are mostly accompanied by pullbacks. After a brief period of euphoria, the market returns to a calm risk assessment phase. Whether they can withstand this test will determine if they replicate the miracle of ZEC or merely reenact the illusion of a fleeting moment.

The deeper reality is: the current crypto market is lacking new narratives and liquidity is tightening. The “resurrection” of old coins is more like a nostalgic behavior when funds have nowhere to go, a brief look back at the early “idealistic era” of crypto.

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

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