Altcoin Monero Surges as Owners Set Withdrawal From Exchanges
Altcoin Monero Surges as Owners Set Withdrawal From Exchanges
(Bloomberg) -- Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero is staging a surprising surge on Monday, running counter to the declines shown by most other tokens.
Monero rose as much as 14%, while Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, dropped 4% and Ether fell 5%. Other altcoins tumbled even more, with Ethereum Classic and EOS down more than 8%.
The rally in Monero came as some of the token owners attempted to withdraw their holdings from major exchanges in a coordinated move dubbed the “Monerun.”
According to a post on the token’s dedicated subreddit, the move away from exchanges is designed to create an intentional short squeeze.
“The Monero community has come to a loose consensus that many exchanges don’t actually hold all of the Monero which customers have purchased,” according to the post by Reddit user “bawdyanarchist”.
The withdrawal is intended to force those exchanges to purchase actual tokens, which would in turn send Monero’s price much higher, the Reddit user said in the post.
Other commenters on the Reddit post alleged that some exchanges trade or invest their users’ crypto assets versus simply holding them. Typically, large exchange wallet addresses are known and visible on chain, making it relatively transparent to track or review trades. Because Monero, a so-called “privacy coin,” uses an obfuscated ledger, transactions are more difficult to verify.
Monero has been on a month-long rally since another Monero-focused blog made the case that token owners should withdraw from exchanges including Binance.
“Binance has a strict internal policy of not allowing any use of token holdings from users,” a spokesperson from Binance told Bloomberg by email. “We have an internal monitoring system to handle the reconciliation to ensure that the blockchain balance is the same as the system balance.”
Monero reached an all-time high of $518 per coin last May before tumbling to the record low of $132 in late February. It’s up almost 11% in 2022.
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