Yesterday, the ancient privacy coin Monero ($XMR) suddenly exploded after being silent for a long time. It soared 30% in a single day, and the price rose to $329, setting a new high since 2021. What is this 11-year-old coin? And why did it suddenly soar?
The most OG privacy coin
In 2013, Nicolas van Saberhagen published the CryptoNote protocol. Monero was born on this basis in April 2014 and switched to RandomX in 2019.
Monero uses technologies such as ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT to hide the sender, receiver, and amount of transactions. This high degree of anonymity gives it an advantage in privacy protection, and Moneros modular code structure has been praised by Wladimir J. van der Laan, one of the Bitcoin Core maintainers.
However, while maintaining privacy, it also makes it difficult to meet the regulatory authorities anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) requirements. As one of the most well-known privacy coins, it is a coin with two sides. On the one hand, its focus on privacy, decentralization and scalability is loved by many people who love liberalism, but on the other hand, it has become a hotbed for criminals.
Criminals favorite
At the end of summer 2016, with the arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, the police department mastered the Bitcoin tracing technology in the long struggle. Major dark web markets such as AlphaBay began to abandon Bitcoin and adopt Monero, which is more difficult to trace. North Koreas hacker group Lazarus Group also likes to use Monero to launder assets, which made Moneros market value break through from 5 million US dollars to 185 million US dollars for the first time in 2016 and the rapid growth of transaction volume.
2020 is the second hot period for Monero. This year, the terrorist organization ISIS updated its website, indicating that it would no longer accept Bitcoin donations but the more private token Monero. The reason is that if ISISs Bitcoin reserves are too large, it may be difficult for the terrorist organization to transfer or cash them out. A report from Chainalysis also confirmed this, saying that ISIS holds less than $100,000 in Bitcoin, and most other terrorist organizations are in a similar situation. In the same year, darknet market sales increased by 70% year-on-year. Monero became one of the main payment tools due to its privacy characteristics, accounting for 45%, almost the same as Bitcoin.
Darknet transactions, scams, ransoms for kidnapping, and exit routes for hackers to steal coins, it can be said that Monero is notorious. With the large-scale adoption of underground transactions, the price of XMR tokens has risen from $50 at the beginning of 2020 to $150 at the end of the year, and reached $450 by mid-2021.
Key to Freedom
Although Monero has long been associated with crime, it is only a technical tool. The Monero development team has always adhered to the code neutral position. They emphasize that Monero is designed for everyday use by ordinary people, and any technology can be abused, such as cash. They do not cooperate with criminal activities and have no connection with criminal organizations.
Therefore, from another perspective, it implements Bitcoins freedom of transaction and is deeply supported by many geeks who support the spirit of liberalism, privacy first, and decentralized anti-censorship. Many people in the community believe that it is the real Bitcoin.
John McAfee, who founded the first antivirus software McAfee, is one of them. Monero is one of the truly anonymous cryptocurrencies, while Bitcoin is not truly anonymous. He expressed his recognition of Moneros technical strength and privacy features on many occasions during his lifetime. Moneros anonymity and untraceability are highly consistent with the concept of privacy liberalism that McAfee has long advocated.
Even Bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver rebelled. In his first public interview after being released on bail in 2024, Roger said that he decided to give up Bitcoin and instead favored tokens such as Monero that provide more privacy. Most people today use custodial wallets, which are not really wallets at all, but just an account that is no more private than your account at Bank of America or Paypal. But fortunately, there are other cryptocurrencies like Monero that provide more privacy protection.
In areas where cryptocurrencies are active, some e-commerce or independent merchants will accept Monero as a payment method, such as some technology-related online stores hardware wallets or cryptocurrency-related technology products or offline retail stores. Community member Schmidt also posted a receipt for buying low-fat organic cocoa drinks at Spar using Monero.
Note: SPAR is one of the worlds largest food retail chains, founded in 1932 by Adriaan van Well in the Netherlands. It has more than 13,900 stores in 48 countries. The Kreuzlingen store purchased by the community member is located in Switzerland and has attracted much attention for accepting cryptocurrency assets such as Bitcoin and Monero.
When the comment section described Monero as a cryptocurrency used for money laundering, the well-known on-chain detective ZachXBT retorted, No, I often use Monero to pay, which shows that he is also one of the Monero enthusiasts.
Short-term Pump or Value Discovery?
Stolen funds flow in
Chain detective ZachXBT posted on social media that nine hours ago, a suspicious transfer of 3,520 bitcoins (about $330.7 million) occurred at a certain address. These funds were then laundered through more than 6 instant trading platforms and converted into Monero, causing the price of Monero to soar by 50%.
This also led to a large amount of liquidation of short contracts on the token, and traders were forced to buy back the asset, adding further upward pressure on top of the growing spot demand. These combined factors may have contributed to Monero’s recent sudden rise.
Project progress is positive
Some analysts believe that the growing expectations for the Monero EP 159 and EP 160 upgrade proposals are also one of the factors behind this rise. The proposals can make Monero more compliant and friendly, allowing users to provide proof of transaction validity without exposing sensitive private information. The community believes that this upgrade may allow Monero, which has been delisted by major CEXs since the EUs updated anti-money laundering regulations in 2024, to be relisted on compliant head CEXs such as Binance and Coinbase.
In addition, the first DeFi project Tari will soon appear in the Monero ecosystem. The project plans to merge mining with Monero and launch the mainnet on May 6. Many people in the Monero community are looking forward to the emergence of this project.
When the tool is created, the concept of good and evil gives it more meanings. Monero is like a microcosm of current cryptocurrencies, weighing between freedom and regulation, and hovering between human rights and crime. The goodness and evil of human nature are infinitely magnified here, just like what Einstein said when commenting on the atomic bomb: Science and technology are a double-edged sword. It can benefit mankind, but it can also destroy the world.
