Santiment ranks Dash, Chainlink and HOPR as top privacy projects by development activity

Dash has taken first place in Santiment’s latest ranking of privacy-focused crypto projects by development activity. Chainlink sits in second and HOPR in third.

The list, published on November 13, 2026, measures what developers actually shipped over the past 30 days.

Who made the cut

Santiment, the crypto analytics platform, ranked privacy projects by their GitHub activity across a 30-day window. Dash ($DASH) led the field, followed by Chainlink ($LINK) and HOPR ($HOPR).

The rest of the top ten included Zama ($ZAMA), NYM ($NYM), Zcash ($ZEC), Monero ($XMR), Dusk ($DUSK), Aztec ($AZTEC) and Anyone ($ANYONE).

Santiment marked Dash and HOPR as rising compared with its previous update. Chainlink was marked as slightly falling.

The list includes established privacy coins such as Dash, Zcash and Monero. It also includes infrastructure projects such as Chainlink and HOPR, which incorporate privacy technology without being privacy coins in the classic sense.

How Santiment counts the work

Santiment’s approach tracks notable GitHub contributions such as commits and pull requests. It filters out lower-value actions, including forks and irrelevant updates.

The goal is to measure real engineering output rather than activity that only looks like progress. The method has limits: it counts public GitHub activity, so work done in private repositories or off-platform will not show up. It also measures quantity of meaningful contributions, not their quality.

Santiment presents the metric as one input among several. It is meant to be read alongside on-chain and social data, not used as a standalone buy signal.

A recurring scoreboard

Santiment has released several comparable rankings of privacy development activity across 2025 and 2026. Across those reports, projects such as Dash, HOPR and NYM have kept attracting builder attention.

The latest update also shows how the privacy category has changed. It now covers more than coins built mainly to hide transaction details. It includes infrastructure that adds privacy features to other parts of the crypto stack, including oracles and anonymity tools. That shift explains why Chainlink, Zama and Aztec appear on the same list as Monero.

What this means for traders and builders

For traders, the important caveat is that development activity does not move prices on a schedule. Santiment’s own framing is that high activity can point to long-term project health. It does not necessarily mean prices will move in the near term.

Dash’s climb to first place is notable for one of the older names in the privacy sector. HOPR’s rise to third suggests infrastructure-style privacy work is getting more engineering effort. Chainlink’s slight decline is minor in isolation.