LearningBlockchain
|7 min ReadStaying Private in Crypto: 10 Real Privacy Habits That Actually Work
Lucca Menezes
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Alpha Briefing: Privacy in crypto is getting squeezed by KYC rules, chain analytics, and permanent public ledgers. A new wave of real-world OpSec focuses on fresh wallets, clean network habits, and privacy tools like Monero, CoinJoin, and VPNs. Used together, these tactics make tracing you expensive and painful, even in a heavily surveilled 2025 market.
Crypto started as a promise of freedom and privacy. Today, almost everything is tracked, indexed, and sold. Blockchains are permanent public ledgers, centralized exchanges demand your ID, and analytics companies make millions connecting that “random” wallet to your real life. The game changed, but privacy is not dead. You just need to play smarter.
Behind a lot of the most practical advice is Vladimir S., known for Officer's Notes and the X account , a guy who openly says he looked at the worst OpSec in the space so you do not have to. He treats Operational Security the way pros do. OpSec is simply the habits and processes you use to keep sensitive information away from enemies, scammers, and surveillance desks in both companies and governments.
In his world, you do not need tinfoil, you just need a system. A few habits change everything. The chains will always remember, but you can make it very expensive for them to remember you.
Split Your Wallets And Identities Like They Are Exes
The first rule is simple. Stop reusing wallet addresses. Every time you receive money on the same address, you hand the entire world a perfect, time-stamped history of your life. The fix is boring but powerful. Generate a new address for every payment or at least for each relationship. One address for salary, one for trading, one for DeFi, one for pure degen fun. Most good wallets already support automatic fresh addresses. You just need to make sure the feature is turned on.
The second rule is to separate your identities as if they are ex-partners who must never meet. Keep a public wallet that you are willing to connect to Twitter, Discord, and community sites. Assume this one will be doxxed eventually. Park your real net worth somewhere else, in a serious money cold-storage wallet that never touches the internet, never touches dApps, and never shows up on a random mint.
Then keep one or two daily hot wallets for trading, farming, and DeFi. You top them up only when needed. Serious coins flow one way, from cold to hot, as little as possible. If you must move funds between these worlds, do not link them directly on-chain. Use a no-KYC exchange as a bridge or route through Monero to break the trail.
KYC exchanges are a necessary evil, not a home. Once you hand over your passport to platforms like Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken, every deposit and withdrawal from those accounts is tied to your legal name forever. The advice is clear. Use those venues only when you have no other choice for fiat on-ramp or off-ramp. Move the coins out immediately into a private wallet and never reuse that same address for your personal stack.
For more private flows in 2025, peer-to-peer and no-KYC tools are the real pipeline. On the list are Bisq and Haveno in the Monero world, LocalMonero while it is still online, and P2P services like NoOnes, Hodl Hodl, and Peach Bitcoin for BTC. For swaps, SimpleSwap, ChangeNOW, and FixedFloat offer no-KYC conversions that help you avoid welding your identity to your transaction graph.
Use The Right Privacy Tools: Monero, CoinJoin, Mixers, And VPNs
On privacy coins, the message is blunt. Bitcoin is not private. Ethereum is not private. Monero is the asset that actually tries to be private by design, with ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT hiding amounts and sources. If you truly need to cut the link between sender and receiver, convert into XMR, move it, then convert back only if necessary. Fees and liquidity can be annoying, but it still works better than anything else for breaking surveillance.
On Bitcoin, the main tool is CoinJoin, used properly, not lazily. Wasabi Wallet and JoinMarket remain key options. Samourai Wallet’s Whirlpool is effectively gone after the arrests in 2024, so Wasabi is the primary consumer route today. You should mix before you consolidate UTXOs and after you buy. You do not do a single tiny join and call it a day. You run multiple rounds to make the graph messy.
For Ethereum, privacy means using the right layers and tools, and avoiding obvious traps. Tornado Cash is sanctioned and carries serious legal risk in some jurisdictions. That is the reality. Alternatives today include Railgun, which offers shielded balances on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, and BSC, Aztec as a full privacy L2, and Nightfall, Polygon’s privacy chain that is still operating. If you are extra paranoid, you combine these with a fresh wallet, a VPN, and then burn the wallet after a single session so the identity never builds up.
A good VPN or Tor is non-negotiable. Your IP address is a big leak. Never connect your wallet without some network protection. The preferred options are paid VPNs where you control keys and where logging is minimal. Names that come up are Mullvad, IVPN, and Proton. You avoid free VPNs, and you avoid big brands that have already been caught lying about logs, such as Express, Nord, and Surfshark. For maximum paranoia, Tor with bridges or i2p can be used, but that will be painfully slow for trading.
Lock Down Your Browser, Hardware, And Social Life
Browser hygiene is one of the most underrated parts of OpSec. You treat your crypto browsing as a separate life. Use a separate browser profile, or even an entirely separate browser, just for wallets and dApps. Brave or Firefox are good baselines. Layer them with uBlock Origin to kill trackers and ClearURLs to strip identifying junk from links. Turn off WebRTC so your IP does not leak outside the VPN tunnel. Never log into Google, Discord, or Twitter in that same profile, because those logins are giant identity anchors. On Firefox, Multi-Account Containers are a powerful way to sandbox sites into separate boxes so they cannot cross-link you.
For signing and custody, you use hardware. Ledger, Trezor, Keystone, GridPlus Lattice, and similar devices give you a physical barrier between your keys and the internet. You sign transactions offline. You never type your seed phrase into any website, ever. If any site or app asks you for your seed or your private key, that is not a grey area. It is a one hundred percent confirmed scam.
The last behavioral rule is as old as money. Do not brag. When you post portfolio screenshots, ENS names, NFT flexes, or “just aped 50 ETH into $PEPE” from an account tied to your real name, you are doing half the investigation for the chain analytics firms. Every flex is a data point. Once that account is tied to your identity, the full picture of your holdings is just a graph query away.
New Privacy Features And Supporting The Work
Some of the strongest tools are still coming online. Stealth addresses are finally arriving on Ethereum mainnet with standards like ERC-5564 and ERC-6538. Wallets that support them will let you receive funds without exposing a single reuse-prone public address. On Bitcoin payments, PayJoin, also known as P2EP, is gaining traction, making surveillance harder even without full CoinJoin rounds by blending sender and receiver flows inside a single transaction.
You do not need to implement every trick on day one to be “private enough” for most real-world situations. The author argues that simply following the key habits about fresh addresses, split identities, avoiding KYC for sensitive flows, and always using a VPN already gets you most of the way there. Perfection is not the goal. The goal is to tilt the economics so that tracking you is expensive, slow, and unattractive.
He closes with a familiar line for anyone who has watched this space for a while. Stay safe out there. The chains never forget, but you can make it really expensive for them to remember you.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.