The price of Monero (XMR) has recently recorded a strong rebound, perhaps thanks to the latest news and the fork.
Sure, the current price, about $55, is still much lower than the price in mid-February, when it touched $100, but it went up a lot after the collapse on March 13th that brought it below $29.
In reality, from a long term perspective, it’s following a downward trend, considering that a year ago it was still worth more than $60, which rose to almost $120 at the end of June 2019, and then fell quite steadily to $45 in December of the same year.
In any case, this is nothing compared to the peak of January 7th, 2018, when it exceeded 480 dollars: with respect to back then, it’s down by more than 85%. Bitcoin, for example, reached its peak on December 17th, 2017 at about $20,000, while today, with a price of about $7,000, it’s below 65%.
However, the recent development of Monero is linked to the fork at the end of 2019 which introduced the new PoW called RandomX. At the end of November, this caused the hashrate to skyrocket from 300 Mhash/s to over 750 Mhash/s in two days, and then further increased to over 1,400 Mhash/s in mid-February.
Even after the collapse of the price in mid-March, the hashrate has always remained above 1,100 Mhash/s, indicating a considerable interest on the part of the miners in this cryptocurrency with a high level of privacy, despite the ups and downs of the price.
The mid-February 2020 peak was, in fact, the highest ever for Monero’s hashrate, a direct consequence of the hard fork at the end of November.
In addition, thanks to a very recent soft fork, the level of privacy was further increased with Dandelion++, which made it the most used privacy coin in the world.
It is enough to look at the graph of daily transactions to realize that these last two forks have literally revived a blockchain that, besides the June 2019 exploit, hasn’t seemed to grow much in a long time.
Until mid-October 2019, more or less 4,000 transactions per day were recorded, as opposed to over 300,000 BTC transactions, but by the second half of October, the volume had risen first to about 8,000 transactions per day, then to over 9,000 in January 2020, and then well over 10,000 transactions per day in April.
A very curious thing is the exchange rate between XMR and BTC. In fact, until the end of June 2019, this rate was falling almost constantly, reaching 0.0078 BTC for XMR. Since then, however, it has remained fairly constant, so much so that, at present, it is 0.0079 BTC.
During the January 2018 peak, XMR had reached 0.0337 BTC, which is 326% more than it is now.
Since then, there has been a very prolonged collapse that stopped only a year and a half later, in June 2019, when it reached a value equal to what it had in November 2016, a year before the big speculative bubble.
This dynamic is very curious and reveals that probably the price ratio between XMR and BTC has settled down, as it has been more or less stable for almost a year now.
