XMR Surges Despite Global Exchange Crackdown! Regulatory Bans Turn Out to Be the Strongest Buying Opportunity?

XMR 1月13日创新高至690美元，近一年从200美元飙升262%。Binance下架、Dubai禁令隔日却逆势创新高。交易所成交量仅数千万至2亿美元，持仓2.4亿美元显示机构未大举入场。挖矿难度快速攀升，交易费从0.1美元飙升至0.3美元。黑白真相：监管封杀强化稀缺性，信息不对称下的资本操控。

The Paradox of Increasing Prices Despite Increasing Suppression

From January 2025 to now, nearly a year, XMR has soared from around 200 USD, with a maximum increase of 262%. In the context of generally weak mainstream altcoins, such a rise is extremely rare. Even more intriguing is that this rally occurred amid unprecedented global regulatory tightening. Due to compliance pressures, major centralized exchanges like Binance have already delisted spot trading of XMR. On January 12, the Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA) officially announced a ban on trading and custody of privacy tokens within Dubai and free zones.

However, this ban not only failed to cast a shadow over XMR but instead created a new high against the trend, giving Dubai a dose of irony. This phenomenon of “rising despite bans” reveals the unique logic of the privacy coin market—when compliance channels are cut off, XMR reverts to a mode controlled by genuine users or some heavyweight players. After leaving the exchange system, privacy coins have taken on a completely different independent rhythm from the mainstream market.

In the gap between liquidity drying up on exchanges and regulatory sticks waving, who are the true drivers behind XMR’s rise? Despite the hot market, it is not dominated by funds within exchanges. In terms of spot trading, recent volume has increased with the price rise but remains mostly in the range of tens of millions to 2 hundred million USD, without any particularly exaggerated increase. Historically, the actual high point of spot trading volume was on November 10, with 410 million USD.

In the derivatives market, the situation is similar. The peak trading volume also occurred on November 10. Since then, until about a week ago, derivatives trading volume has not shown significant surges and even shows some decline. Observing the open interest data, the dollar-denominated change curve almost exactly overlaps with the price trend. The market’s XMR holdings have not experienced abnormal surges; the increase in open interest is merely due to the price rise, not large-scale new capital entering to open positions. This indicates that in this recent doubling rally, spot trading or spot buying within centralized exchanges is not the main driver. Clearly, mainstream exchanges are not the core venue for current XMR pricing.

Hidden Supply-Side Currents Laid by Miners in Advance

Since the “visible” capital is unremarkable, we need to turn to the “hidden” on-chain world. As the most privacy-focused network, XMR has minimal accessible data, but changes in mining difficulty and mining rewards can give us clues about capital’s layout on the supply side. Mining difficulty historically reflects the enthusiasm of capital participation in the network ecosystem. Data shows that XMR’s mining difficulty began to rise rapidly at the end of 2024, maintaining a fast growth throughout the first half of 2025.

A notable episode: in September, the Qubic project claimed control of over 51% of the total network hash rate and conducted a “demonstration attack,” causing an 18-block chain reorganization. This event sounded an alarm in the community, after which many miners migrated hash power to the established pool SupportXMR. This incident was a major reason for the sharp fluctuations in mining difficulty at the end of 2025, but also indirectly confirmed the activity and resilience of the hash power market.

Three Major Signals from Mining Data

Rapid difficulty increase at end of 2024: Large miners pre-positioned, increasing hash power despite low returns

Miner capitulation in April 2025: Falling mining rewards forced small miners out, concentration of chips among big players

Resilience after 51% attack in September: Community responded quickly, migrated hash power, demonstrating network robustness

More importantly, the link between mining rewards and difficulty is worth noting. Before April 2025, Monero’s mining rewards experienced a clear decline. Coupled with the difficulty chart at that time, hash power surged sharply while the price remained volatile. This divergence diluted rewards, possibly forcing higher-cost small miners to exit, which is supported by the difficulty retracement in April. This is a typical “miner capitulation” and “chip exchange” scenario. From the data changes during this phase, some risk-resistant large miners or capital may have already begun pre-positioning Monero mining early in 2025 at low yields.

Rising Transaction Fees Confirm Genuine Demand

If miners represent the supply-side confidence, then average transaction fees most truly reflect user demand. Data shows that Monero’s average transaction fee remained relatively stable below 0.1 USD before mid-2025. But starting in June, an upward trend emerged; by December 11, the peak average fee reached over 0.3 USD, more than tripling compared to half a year earlier.

Thanks to Monero’s dynamic block size adjustment mechanism, the surge in fees indicates that a large number of users are trying to send transactions quickly and are willing to pay high fees to compensate miners for expansion costs. This indirectly proves that from the second half of 2025, real transaction demand on the Monero chain has increased significantly. Interestingly, we also observe a pattern: surges in on-chain fees often coincide with sharp price increases.

For example, on April 28, XMR suddenly rose 14%, and the average transaction fee spiked to over 0.125 USD; during the subsequent slow price climb, fees fell back to lows (bottom at 0.058 USD on May 4). This indicates that although market volatility can temporarily boost on-chain demand, when volatility subsides, on-chain demand also calms down. Although the two are sometimes asynchronous, overall, in the past half year, price increases temporarily drove on-chain demand, and the genuine growth in on-chain demand in turn fueled market optimism for XMR—both are causal.

Black and White: Fragile Resilience and Information Manipulation

Combining the above data, the explosive rise of XMR has a “black and white” truth. The “white” side is the anti-fragility of privacy demand under high regulation pressure. The counterproductive effect of regulation is becoming more evident; Dubai VARA’s ban not only failed to crush XMR but also made market participants realize: regulators can ban exchanges but cannot ban the protocol itself. When major exchanges exit XMR trading, the logic of market-making and derivative pricing is rewritten, and XMR reverts to a mode controlled by genuine users or some heavyweight players.

The “black” side is the capital game under information asymmetry. Behind this opacity, there may be “whales” lurking beneath the iceberg. The “not-so-impressive” trading data (even on January 13, when it hit a new high, the derivatives open interest was only 2.4 billion USD, with liquidation volume just over 1 million USD) shows that mainstream institutions almost failed to anticipate and participate in this rally early, only following behind. This information gap controlled by a few leads to extreme price volatility. Especially when the market begins to focus on such rises, it often signals short-term emotional overheating. Looking at privacy coin ZEC in November, after a surge, it retraced over 50%.

Ultimately, in the privacy coin market, there is a large amount of “information asymmetry,” putting retail investors at a significant disadvantage. During these intense fluctuations, on-chain data may be our only trustworthy guide. But in the deep sea of opacity, high premiums for freedom always come with unknown risks.