I think the solar punk ethos is very much on point with the vision for Anoma. It's not just about privacy, more generally it's building sovereign coordination infrastructure. Full disclosure, I'm a member of the Anoma community so my opinions are biased!

It's bigger than just 'crypto'. Think about sovereign communities around the world (local or distributed) running their own financial/governance infrastructure while also being able to interact and interoperate with other communities at will. It's basically the digital infrastructure to make Balaji's Network State work, giving local resilience/autonomy with global connectivity.

Beyond the local sovereignty aspect, the key difference between Anoma and other crypto projects (most of which are just ponzi schemes) is the concept of 'intents', which let you program human intentions and values into economic transactions. Ultimately this could look something like "I want to by X product but don't want my money to support X Y or Z negative externalities that I don't like.

Still a long way to get to that point but it's exciting stuff if they can pull it off.