Solana Won the Speed War in 2021; ZKP Is Winning the Privacy War in 2026 – Is This The Next 100x Crypto?

by Arjun Agarwal

In the 2021 cycle, the market repriced Solana from $1 to $260 for a single, defining reason: Speed. At the time, Ethereum was expensive and slow, and the market was desperate for high-throughput infrastructure. Solana solved that bottleneck, and early believers were rewarded with life-changing multiples.

Fast forward to January 2026, and the "Speed War" is officially over. With the Firedancer validator client now live on mainnet, processing over 1 million transactions per second, and Visa launching USDC settlement for U.S. banks on Solana, the network has cemented itself as the global standard for high-speed execution.

But in markets, the outsized returns never come from solving yesterday’s problem. They come from solving tomorrow's problems.

As capital rotates out of legacy Layer-1s in Q1 2026, analysts are identifying a new, far more dangerous bottleneck that speed cannot fix: Data Privacy in the Age of AI.

This shift is why Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) is increasingly being named the Best Crypto To Buy for the current cycle. Just as Solana won the speed war, ZKP is positioned to win the privacy war, and the repricing potential for early Stage 2 participants mirrors the early days of Solana’s ascent.

The New Bottleneck: Why Speed Is No Longer Enough

In 2021, the question was, "Can we build it fast enough?"

In 2026, the question is, "Can we build it without exposing the data?"

As Artificial Intelligence integrates into finance, healthcare, and enterprise systems, the transparency of public blockchains has become a liability.

Solana is fast, but it is transparent. It was built for speed, not secrecy. This leaves a trillion-dollar gap in the market for a high-performance Layer-1 that offers verifiable computation without data exposure.

ZKP fills that gap.

ZKP: The "Solana" of Privacy

The comparison between Solana and ZKP is structural. Both projects ignored the prevailing narratives of their time to build heavy, scalable infrastructure first.

ZKP is not a privacy coin like Monero, which is designed for hiding transactions. ZKP is a privacy infrastructure layer. It allows AI models and smart contracts to run on-chain, verify the results using zero-knowledge proofs, and keep the inputs completely invisible.

This is the "middleware" that allows institutions to finally use public blockchains. It is the exact same adoption curve Solana saw with payments, but applied to the far larger market of Private AI Compute.

When Solana launched, its repricing took 18 months because the ecosystem had to be built from scratch. ZKP is entering the market with a fully built network, $100M in pre-launch infrastructure, and a supply mechanic that is far more aggressive than Solana’s early inflation.

We are currently in Stage 2 of the ZKP presale auction.

While Solana’s supply expanded in its early years, ZKP’s supply is designed to contract through its auction stages. Every 24 hours, the math gets harder. The "burn" creates a deflationary pressure that forces price discovery upward independent of hype.

Why Buy the Presale Instead of Waiting for Listing?

The advantage of entering the presale is structural. Once ZKP hits secondary markets (exchanges), the price becomes a function of speculation and liquidity premiums. The presale auction is the only window to access primary issuance, where your entry price is governed by transparent math—daily contributions divided by the fixed 190M supply cap. 

The cost of waiting is real: with the Stage 2 burn mechanism now active, any unallocated supply is destroyed daily, permanently shrinking the available pool. By the time the wider market reacts to a public listing, the supply curve will have already tightened, forcing latecomers to pay a premium for what early participants secured at cost. In infrastructure plays, the outsized returns belong to those who position themselves before the repricing event occurs.

Catching the Next Infrastructure Giant

If you bought Solana in 2021, you didn't buy a token; you bought the solution to the biggest problem in crypto.

In 2026, speed is a commodity. It’s cheap, abundant, and solved. The scarcity has moved to Privacy.

ZKP represents the infrastructure layer that solves this new bottleneck. For investors looking for the Best Crypto To Buy in a market where the majors are already priced in, ZKP offers the rare chance to enter a foundational Layer-1 before the rest of the world realizes that the war has shifted from how fast we can compute, to how privately we can think.

Stage 2 is live. The supply cap is active. The privacy war has begun.

Website: https://zkp.com/

Buy: http://buy.zkp.com/ 

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