Cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) has just reached a historic high of 16,689 transactions in a single day on Tuesday, the first day of September. And, whether you like it or not, the reason may be linked to the black market and the preference for cryptocurrencies focused on privacy.
Number of daily transactions on the Monero network (XMR). Source: Bitinfocharts.
Monero and the black market
After the fall of the Empire Market, until then the largest black market in the darknet (DNM), the White House Market has now become the largest in the sector. While the Empire Market accepted Bitcoin as the default currency, now all major markets have XMR as the main cryptocurrency.
According to researcher Dark.Fail, White House is the market "known as the safest" and has about 68 thousand users. To get an idea of the potential of this relatively new DNM, the Empire Market had more than one million users.
This change from the standard cryptocurrency of the main DNMs could mean great growth potential for Monero to break new records for on-chain numbers. After all, after several cases of people being arrested for conducting negotiations on these sites, users are increasingly concerned with privacy.
Furthermore, despite data from Chainalysis showing that the black market does not represent the crypto market, Covid-19 appears to have boosted the volume moved on the darknet.
Can Monero transactions be tracked?
In an official statement, CipherTrace recently claimed that it created the first Monero monitoring tool in history.
However, CEO Dave Jevans said the XRM tracking uses a probabilistic process. That is, there is no complete certainty about the conclusions of the tool.
In addition, the community raised doubts about the effectiveness of tracing after Dave was unable to explain any part of the methods used to track transactions.
Even so, it is possible that part of the number of daily transactions on the network comes from this tracking tool, in a kind of attempt to map the transactions (decoy poison).
