monero’s XMR has been going up only since April
and its relentless rise has caught many by surprise and that’s because it has continued
to rally despite being delisted by exchanges and even by some wallets and yet nobody seems to
have noticed that XMR appears to be on the brink of a multi-year breakout if it goes any higher
this breakout will be confirmed foreshadowing an even bigger parabolic pump and that’s why today
we’re going to explain what Monero is a look at what this crypto project has been up to recently
examine why XMR has been rallying so much and see just how high it could go stay tuned before we
begin I need to make it clear that nothing in this video is financial advice it’s just educational
content intended to inform you about Monero i should also note that nobody at the Coin Bureau
team holds XMR in their personal crypto portfolio at the time of shooting and as ever we’ll be as
objective as possible in our analysis if you want to see our full crypto portfolios then become a
member of the Coin Bureau Club that’s where we do deep dives into promising small cap altcoins every
week provide daily crypto market alpha and discuss emerging crypto narratives in the members Discord
if you’re down well uh the link is down below now it’s been over 3 years since we last covered
Monero so a refresher is in order monero was originally founded in April 2014 by a pseudonmous
developer named Thankful for Today the TLDDR from there is that there were disagreements in the
Monero community about the direction of the project the result was that Monero was forked by
a group of developers led by Ricardo Spangni who goes by the pseudonym Fluffy Pony notably
Ricardo stepped down as the lead developer of Monero in 2019 after founding a new privacy
coin called Tari whose mainet recently launched to be clear Ricardo is still involved in Monero
and Tari happens to be a merge mind coin with Monero like Dogecoin is merge mined with Litecoin
tari would actually be the kind of altcoin that we cover in the Coin Bureau Club by the way anyways
since its community takeover Monero has evolved to become the largest privacy coin by market
cap and is considered as being the OG privacy coin despite not being the first to many in crypto
Monero is basically the only privacy coin that’s seen as legit and that’s because its cuttingedge
privacy protocols have yet to be cracked despite multiple attempts by government agencies and
blockchain analytics companies for context most cryptocurrency transactions are public and
this means that it’s very easy to trace them especially if you ever transferred crypto to or
from an exchange that required KYC not only that but even privacy protocols like crypto mixers
have been cracked by government agencies and blockchain analytics companies and the same is
reportedly true of some other privacy coins too naturally there have been a few reports about
government agencies and blockchain analytics companies tracing Monero transactions but in every
case so far this was either due to the user making operational security or OPSSE mistakes like
posting personal details online or authorities running malicious nodes we leave a link to a video
down in the description that explains how this is done if you’re interested anyhow privacy isn’t
the only thing that makes Monero different from most other cryptos unlike most other cryptos there
was no ICO for Monero and there is also no legal entity behind Monero and this means that the XMR
coin was fairly launched and it has no centralized point of failure or pressure xmr itself follows
a fascinating supply curve wherein roughly 18 million XMR were mined during the first 6 years
in May 2022 it began its so-called pale emission wherein 0.6 6 XMR are mined each block forever
and this means XMR has no maximum supply but a decrease in inflation rate over time under the
hood Monero uses a proofof work blockchain that’s capable of processing up to 2,000 transactions
per second and this is possible due to its novel dynamic block size mechanism which makes it
possible to temporarily increase block size to accommodate more transactions during times
of high traffic the caveat is that transaction times have a long confirmation time of about
20 to 40 minutes now in terms of mining Monero uses a mining algorithm called random X which is
resistant to ASIC mining now for reference ASIC miners are custom mining machines used to mine
larger proofof work cryptos like Bitcoin and many have argued that ASIC miners have centralized the
Bitcoin blockchain as a result a Monero’s random X ensures that essentially anyone can mine it
with a regular computer finally we have Monero’s privacy protocols of which there are three main
ones ringct which hides the amounts sent in a transaction stealth addresses which hides where
the transactions are going to and Ring signatures which hide where the transactions are coming from
do note that this only just scratches the surface of how Monero’s privacy protocols work and there
are other things including to interoperability and dandelion plus as I mentioned in the introduction
Monero’s bulletproof privacy has resulted in it being delisted from multiple exchanges and even
some wallets however the Monero community has simultaneously developed new technologies like
atomic swaps that make it possible to exchange XMR for other cryptos directly in other words
the constant attacks on Monero have arguably made it stronger not weaker say if you believe
financial privacy is a human right like we do last time we covered Monero was in early May 2022
just before its tail emission began 1 month later Ricardo was extradited by US authorities to face
fraud charges in South Africa that were unrelated to Monero even so some do believe that this
was evidence of lawfare in plain English it’s possible that authorities targeted Ricardo because
of his work on Monero in any case in August 2022 Monero underwent a hard fork that introduced a
series of optimizations to its blockchain such as reduced transaction size increased transaction
speed and faster wallet synchronization one month later HTX formerly known as Hi announced that
it would be delisting XMR but it seems that this never happened and that’s because HTX still lists
XMR probably nothing regardless fast forward to February 2023 when Monero published a blog post
asking if any developers would be interested in working on two privacy protocols that would be
implemented in the next hard fork in 2 years time in case it wasn’t clear enough 2 years from 2023
is this year lo and behold it looks like there will be another major upgrade in the next few
months but we’ll come back to that a bit later now March 2023 is when things got a little bit
scary for Monero and that’s because rumors started circulating that Ricardo had allegedly offered
to help European authorities trace transactions presumably as part of a plea deal in his ongoing
court case as with the news of Chain Analysis tracking XMR transactions this doesn’t tell
the full story and we’ll leave a link to what happened in the description speaking of Monero FUD
there was more in May 2023 when Mordinals launched on its blockchain as the name suggests Morinals
are effectively ordinal NFTts but on Monero now since ordinals involve attaching arbitrary data
to individual units of a crypto coin there were concerns that Mordinals could impact on the
fungeibility of certain XMR coins and bloat the blockchain it seems that this is not an actual
issue though what was an actual issue was a bug in Monero’s code that was discovered around that time
now without getting too technical the bug made it possible to deanonymize certain transactions that
had taken place exactly 10 blocks after being sent fortunately the bug was quickly patched
unfortunately the main wallet for Monero’s community crowdfunding system was drained a few
months later now for those unaware most Monero development is funded by donations in XMR around
2,700 XMR worth roughly half a million was stolen and it’s believed that this was due to that wallet
being a hot wallet thankfully other wallets were unaffected so developers kept getting paid but
then came late 2023 and early 2024 when a bunch of exchanges including OKX and Binance announced they
would be delisting XMR kraken also delisted XMR for certain European users to add insult to injury
Finnish authorities claimed to have traced certain transactions but obviously there’s more to that
story and we’ll leave a link to yet another video that explains how they did it and uh spoiler alert
it was bad ops there was a silver lining though in the middle of all this FUD Monero developers
offered some FOMO a new privacy protocol called full chain membership proofs or FCMP which
had been under discussion for almost a year fcmp will eliminate many of the attack vectors
currently used by government agencies and blockchain analytics companies to track certain
transactions and we’ll also come back to that a bit later now by the end of 2024 things were
starting to look better for Monero unstoppable Domains partnered with Cakewallet to integrate.xmr
domains making Monero easier to use on that note though I should mention that the Cake Wallet was
caught connecting to compromised Monero nodes and its former VP subsequently launched a blockchain
analytics firm with FBI agents probably nothing whatever the case another positive headline
for Monero came in March this year when BTC started becoming more popular than XMR on darknet
marketplaces because of the latter’s constant dlistings in theory this fact and the fact that
most criminals use cash should take some of the scrutiny off of Monero in practice it had no
effect in the EU which announced that it will be banning all privacy coins by July 2027 and yet
Monero has been rallying since April even with these headwinds now some have speculated that part
of why it’s pumping is because criminals have been swapping stolen funds into XMR namely $330 million
worth of Bitcoin that was recently hacked and supposedly swapped for XMR but of course by now
you’ll know there’s much more to the story than that and it looks like it could get even better
and this brings me to the moment you’ve all been waiting for and that’s XMR’s price analysis and
its price potential for 2025 as I mentioned in the introduction it looks like it’s on the brink
of a massive breakout from a technical perspective it looks like it’s been forming a massive
double bottom pattern since 2017 literally 8 years ago if it plays out XMR could pull a 2x
in the coming months and this begs the question of why XMR has been rallying so much and how it
could experience such an epic pump as far as we can tell the answer is Bitcoin specifically XMR’s
strong correlation to Bitcoin at first glance you might think that this is nothing special after all
most cryptocurrencies are strongly correlated with Bitcoin upon closer inspection however you realize
that there’s a much more direct connection in XMR’s case for starters Ricardo began his career
in Bitcoin mining now the Bitcoin mining industry has close connections to many early altcoins
primarily proofof work altcoins like XMR and if you watched our recent video about Dogecoin
you’ll know that we speculated that the largest Doge whales could be Litecoin miners due to the
fact that Doge has been merge mined with Litecoin since the early days and the result is that most
of Doge’s supply likely ended up in the hands of Litecoin miners it’s possible that we are seeing
something similar here with many early Bitcoin miners potentially mining XMR using their old
Bitcoin mining equipment after AS6 started gaining traction at the same time it’s clear that Monero
has become a de facto privacy layer for all of Bitcoin after the launch of Atomic Swaps we saw
this because we discovered it while researching a crypto project for the Coin Bureau Club this
crypto project was a DEX that would route all swaps through XMR making swaps untraceable
it’s truly innovative technology and it seems to have gained popularity with the availability of
better tools put simply it’s possible that Monero is being pumped by BTC holders looking to scrub
their transaction history be they Bitcoin miners or otherwise in practical terms this involves
swapping BTC to XMR and then slowly swapping XMR back into BTC the initial act of swapping
BTC to XMR is probably what’s causing XMR to pump so much and the slow swap back into Bitcoin
is probably why its price has held up if we are right then XMR should continue to rally alongside
Bitcoin since the more that Bitcoin’s price rises the more Bitcoin we’ll see swapped to XMR around
the margins come to think of it the fact that XMR is listed on fewer exchanges means it’s less
liquid meaning it’s easier to move its price and this could be contributing to its rally and
could result in the same kind of supply shock we could soon see for Bitcoin more about that in this
video over here now whether XMR could 2x from here ultimately depends on Monero’s upcoming milestones
as it so happens Monero has a road map on its website and it includes four milestones the first
is the implementation of optimal static parametric estimation of arbitrary distributions or ops for
short without getting too technical Opset will make it possible to conduct ring signaturebased
transactions after the upcoming FCMP upgrade which you’ll recall eliminates the current ring
signature structure as you might have guessed Opset is just an optimized ring signature scheme
that will be optional to use the second milestone is bulletproofs plus which are likewise an
optimized version of Monero’s zero knowledgebased transaction protocol like the bulletproofs plus
upgrade in August 2022 the bulletproofs plus plus upgrade will further reduce transaction sizes
increase transaction speeds and so on and so on the third milestone is FCMP which requires
getting a bit technical to refresh your memory ring signatures hide where transactions are coming
from they involve taking a group of signaries uh currently 16 and having them all sign one
transaction this way it’s difficult to know who actually sent that transaction the only problem is
that it still means that there’s a 6% chance that someone can guess the right signer fcmp solves
this problem by making it possible for there to be 100 million signitaries instead of just 16 and
this makes it technically impossible to figure out who signed that transaction which is pretty crazy
the craziest part is that it apparently fits hand in glove with Monero’s fourth milestone which is
the implementation of Sarafus and Jamus remember that blog post Monero published in February 2023
asking for developers to help with implementing new privacy protocols these were the ones to our
understanding though Sarafus and Jus have taken a backseat to FCMP and that’s because they involve
increasing the number of signitories and changing address formats which is similar to what FCMP does
moreover FCMP is faster to implement and Sarafus and Jus can still be implemented after FCMP the
key takeaway here is that implementing these new privacy protocols is going to require another hard
fork of the Monero blockchain recent interviews with Monero developers like Luke Parker and Justin
Berman suggest this hard fork will occur by the end of this year possibly as soon as the summer
now I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that many in the Monero community believe that the FCMP
upgrade could lead to mass adoption and that’s because it optimizes privacy while simultaneously
allowing for more optimization of transactions such as Obsad’s ring signatures according to
Monero YouTuber Monero Mateo this flexibility in transactions will make it possible to do things
like selectively reveal certain transactions and this could make XMR more suitable for business
accounting while simultaneously making it more compliant with regulations without sacrificing
privacy there’s just one problem though and that’s that even if Monero was to implement
every customization under the sun to make XMR as userfriendly as possible there’s still one
big hurdle that apparently cannot be overcome and that’s that it takes 20 to 40 minutes
for transactions to finalize and wallets to synchronize monero developers have noted that
this can’t be fixed and it’s a huge hurdle to adoption and this brings me to the challenges that
we foresee for Monero and the first challenge is the obvious one and that’s regulation the good
news is that XMR constantly getting delisted from exchanges is proof that its privacy is legit
because otherwise it wouldn’t be getting delisted the fact that XMR has continued to rally despite
these D-listings is likewise proof that Monero is extremely resilient the bad news is that this
resiliency could change when regulators start coming after users interacting with Monero rather
than the exchanges listing it while this hasn’t happened yet we seem to be on a slippery slope to
that outcome and if that’s the final destination then Monero may struggle to survive the Exodus
wallet announcing it will be ending XMR support this August could be early signs on this side
and this ties into the second challenge that we foresee for Monero and that’s the evident attempts
by government agencies and blockchain analytics companies to undermine the project take a second
to consider that chain analysis was running malicious Monero nodes and it’s not far-fetched to
assert that these same surveillance groups could be paying Monero developers under the table as
well this is a sobering thought given that Monero is months away from one of its biggest hard forks
to date and it seems possible given that this hard fork involves making significant changes to the
core protocol that being said though we haven’t seen any evidence that Monero developers could
be undercover feds and Monero’s open-source code also makes this quite unlikely and this relates
to the third challenge we foresee for Monero and that’s adoption as mentioned Monero is only likely
to rally by 2x from here when you combine this with XMR’s limited accessibility it means that XMR
probably won’t get much attention from speculators meanwhile technical hurdles around user experience
mean that XMR probably won’t get much actual adoption shadow Atlas another pro Monero YouTuber
probably put it best quote “Manero advocates call XMR private digital cash but we don’t use cash
because it’s private we use cash because we know very well that this will be accepted in any shop
restaurant etc in order to buy stuff with it it’s liquid.” Put differently XMR’s biggest hurdle to
adoption is how easy it is to exchange for other goods and services including fiat as Shadow
Atlas also pointed out the biggest risk to XMR is that it becomes very difficult to convert
large amounts of XMR for fiat and vice versa and well this seems to be happening all the while
the average person happily trades away privacy for convenience everywhere they go with all that
said though it’s easy to forget that Monero has been around for more than a decade objectively
speaking the biggest risks to Monero were in the early days at this stage in its development
and adoption it’s going to be very difficult to kill and there are lots of people who want to make
sure it lives monero may never be a moonshot but it will always be the true crypto alternative to
the current system never forget that there is no freedom without financial privacy because total
transparency or surveillance means that you can be controlled and manipulated perhaps someday the
average person will understand this and everyone will ape into XMR but if that day ever comes
though it will be because the world has become truly dystopian a one where Monero holders are
actively pursued by authorities in the meantime just make sure you’re not falling for any of the
popular crypto scams and you can learn more about those in this video right over here and if you’re
not subscribed to the channel yet you can do that right over here this is Nick signing off thank you
very much for watching and I’ll see you again soon
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