Key Takeaways:
- Monero (XMR) price surged over 75% in a day reaching $278, then settled around $170 48 hours later.
- The crypto community thought Russian ‘oligarchs’ might be behind the surge.
YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com)- Privacy protocol Monero’s in-house token XMR settled at approximately $170 in Thursday’s European session, after a 75% explosive rally on Mar. 8 that briefly took the token to $278 on Binance Exchange.
Other than the mentioned price spike, the XMR token mostly mimicked Bitcoin’s price action in the previous months, as illustrated by the chart below.
The rally prompted the crypto community to speculate on what could have caused the value to soar on Binance sharply. Many concluded that Russian users might be doubling down, trying to avoid the monetary sanctions put in place over the invasion of Ukraine.
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In detail, Monero is a privacy protocol that uses a public distributed ledger with privacy-enhancing technologies. The latter obfuscates transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Thus, protocols such as Monero and Zcash can be useful to mask one’s wallet address. In addition, they could come in handy to the Russian elite because of their inherent qualities.
Russian users behind the surge?
As mentioned, the U.S. and the allies heavily sanctioned Russian banks and certain individuals from the Kremlin elite by cutting them off the international SWIFT system. Furthermore, VISA and Master Card services are no longer available in Russia.
Additionally, the harsh sanctions were designed to pressure President Vladimir Putin back to his senses and stop the war in Ukraine. However, Russian ‘oligarchs’ possibly saw the cryptocurrency market as an escape route. Several Twitter users agreed, commenting on the situation.
Also read: U.S. bans Russian oil and gas import as risk assets tumble against the record-high fuel prices.
Another user further commented that “some noob” possibly caused the spike by clearing their order book. Furthermore, as the high trading volume indicated, it might have been a “rich noob,” possibly scrambling the “hide their wealth.”
Despite the array of speculations, none of them is certain. Monero and Zcash, unlike Bitcoin or Ether, use a cryptographic process to ensure that transactions cannot be linked to wallet holders and are untraceable.
