The cryptocurrency that exchanges were supposed to have strangled is posting its best year since 2021. Monero, the granddaddy of privacy coins, now trades above $600—up more than 75 percent over the past twelve months—while supposedly more compliant assets like Cardano and Sui remain deep in the red. The divergence is not a fluke. It is a verdict on three years of regulatory theater.
The delisting wave that swept through centralized exchanges between 2022 and 2024 was meant to be Monero's death sentence. Binance dropped it. Kraken followed in much of Europe. OKX, Huobi, and a parade of smaller platforms joined the exodus, citing anti-money-laundering concerns and the impossibility of tracing XMR transactions. Regulators in the EU, South Korea, and Japan cheered. Privacy coins, the argument went, would wither without on-ramps.
The Hydra effect
They did not wither. Instead, trading migrated to decentralized exchanges, peer-to-peer platforms, and a handful of smaller centralized venues willing to accept the compliance risk. Atomic swaps—trustless cross-chain trades that require no intermediary—matured from a curiosity into a functioning market. The infrastructure that regulators assumed did not exist quietly got built.
Monero's rally this year tracks almost perfectly with growing skepticism about on-chain surveillance. The Chainalysis and Elliptic tools that governments rely on have faced mounting criticism from defense attorneys and academic researchers who question their accuracy. Several high-profile prosecutions have stumbled when blockchain forensics were challenged in court. For users who always suspected that "transparent" blockchains were a privacy nightmare, Monero's value proposition suddenly looks less paranoid and more prescient.
The institutional vacuum
There is, of course, no Monero ETF on the horizon. BlackRock is not filing. Fidelity is not interested. The asset remains untouchable for any fund manager who answers to a compliance department. This is precisely the point. Monero's bid is not coming from institutions seeking regulatory clarity; it is coming from individuals who have concluded that regulatory clarity means surveillance by default.
The rally also reflects a technical reality that critics underestimate. Monero's ring signatures and stealth addresses have been battle-tested for nearly a decade. Unlike newer privacy solutions bolted onto transparent chains, XMR's obfuscation is baked into the protocol. Every transaction is private by default, not by opt-in. That design choice, once dismissed as overkill, now looks like foresight.
Our take
Regulators spent years trying to choke privacy coins through exchange delistings, and all they accomplished was pushing the market underground where they have even less visibility. Monero's resurgence is not an endorsement of illicit finance—it is a market signal that a meaningful cohort of users values financial privacy and will find ways to access it regardless of policy. The question for policymakers is whether they want that activity on regulated rails they can monitor at the edges, or in a parallel economy they cannot see at all. So far, they have chosen the latter, and Monero's price is the receipt.
