Privacy Shift
It seems that one of the more positive things that has come out of the 2025 crypto market is a shift back to utility. Memes aren't the hype anymore and instead we have seen DeFi rise with Aster (although not well decentralized), Ruji (still needs to ship a lot of products) and Hype. Not soon thereafter we have seen a shift to privacy with ZEC making a huge run up to around $700 as well as other privacy coins like DASH. Monero, of course is one of the the oldest and most battle tested privacy coins and has been mainly crab walking for years due to it getting banned everywhere. However, it seems that XMR is actually being used and recent attacks like the 51% sibil attack from Qubic have more been publicity stunts than any real danger to the network. In fact, Qubic is down around 80% since that claim. Numbers don't lie.
Monero at breakout levels
XMR is one of those coins that needs zooming out. In fact, I had to switch to the monthly candle to fit everything neatly on screen. We can see that after the crazy rise from cents to around $500 in 2018, the coin has been trading mainly sideways for years (of course the swings are not that small). All of this gets us an ascending triangle pattern that strongly hints at a potential break out to the top. I am swingly towards that scenario since we can see that support in 2024 and 2025 has held very well. A push towards the top resistance seems almost inevitable now.
Here is a "close up" on the weekly chart: After some brief resistance in the $300 area, price has broken out to the top. Only around 50% remain to reach the macro resistance at just under $700.
Monero's chart is quite interesting. We can see that for almost 2 years price has been in an uptrend while the rest of the market has been mostly in a downtrend. This signals a lot of conviction, actual usage and strength for the coin. It has decoupled from the rest of the Alt market and makes a breakout to the top even more likely.
My outlook for Monero looks something like this:
Should a breakout occur, it is quite difficult to say where price could be heading. A 10x from here would put price at around $4500. This would be less than the run in 2020-2021 when price went from ~$30 to ~$500. A 10x therefore seems reasonable, especially since it would be a major breakout from a 7 year long sideways movement.
Conclusion
Monero itself is currently a top 14 coin with around 8 billion in MC. A 10x would put it at around 80 billion. If the privacy narrative keeps going, I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the 3 digit billions, however. The biggest hurdle for the coin atm is the difficulty of acquiring it. I believe it is only listed on MEXC exchange. Although with DeFi gaining traction as well, that bottleneck may not be too big of a problem. Overall I see a parallel economy for crypto anyway: an institutionalized and a "rogue" one that is more aligned with crypto's original intentions.
As a general reminder: Please keep in mind that none of this is official investment advice! Crypto trading entails a great deal of risk; never spend money that you can't afford to lose!
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