Privacy-centric coin Monero (XMR) soared as much as 50% on Monday, and on-chain investigators have pointed to a theft event as the likely culprit.
Early on Monday, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT flagged a “suspicious transfer” of 3,520 BTC (worth approximately $330.7 million) made from a potential victim’s wallet.
Soon after, the loot was laundered through over six exchanges and converted to Monero to obscure the activity. ZachXBT believes this was theft due to the high fees paid and the suspicious activity after the funds had been moved. The transfer sparked an immediate 50% surge in XMR’s price due to the large-scale conversion and the platform’s limited liquidity.
The on-chain sleuth later noted in follow-up posts that it is “highly probable” the theft was not orchestrated by the infamous North Korean hackers, and that the victim was a longtime Bitcoin holder.
While ordinary blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum allow users to track all transactions on the network, Monero’s privacy-preserving nature hides wallet addresses and transactions, making it harder for law enforcement to trace and recover illicit funds. As such, it remains attractive to nefarious actors who want unlinkable and untraceable transactions.
According to data from CoinGecko, XMR vaulted 50% higher in response to hit an intraday high of $347.72 — a level not seen since May 2021. At the time of publication, Monero is priced at $276.22, still up 22% over the last 24 hours.
The Monero community recently celebrated the coin’s 11th anniversary. Notably, XMR has lost a lot of ground in recent years due to the increasing marginalization of privacy coins. Due to intensifying regulatory pressure, leading crypto exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken, have been forced to delist Monero in various jurisdictions in an effort to fight dark net markets.
