Monero is the coin the industry tried to get rid of — delisted by Binance, banned from Europe's licensed exchanges, never listed by Coinbase at all. It's up 75% in a year, sitting at #13 with an $11.5 billion market cap. The "delisted means dead" story was the bogus one. Privacy turned out to be a product people actually pay for — and this week, one of the last big exchanges holding the line said so out loud.
The week Monero reminded everyone it exists
On Friday (Oct 23), Kraken's co-CEO Arjun Sethi did something exchange executives basically never do: he apologized to Monero holders and reversed his own company's policy in public.
Kraken had emailed some customers who'd bought XMR and withdrawn it — asking who their employer was, where their money came from, and what they planned to do with the coins. Sethi killed it. "No rule required it," he said. Asking where money came from is fair; asking what you'll do with it after it leaves "is not." His sign-off: "xmr stays listed. buy it here, take it home."
XMR popped about 5% on that. Not because one post changes the math — because delisting risk is the story that's hung over this coin for three years, and the biggest exchange still carrying it just said the quiet part out loud.
Monero (XMR)
Official website: getmonero.org
What Monero actually is, in 60 seconds
Monero launched in April 2014. No ICO, no pre-mine, no founder allocation — miners got the coins by mining them, same as early Bitcoin.
The difference is what the blockchain shows. On Bitcoin, anyone can look up any wallet: what it holds, what it sent, where it went. That's fine until your coins get flagged for something a previous owner did.
Monero hides all three parts of a transaction by default — not as a setting, not for a fee:
- Ring signatures hide who sent it
- Stealth addresses hide who received it
- RingCT hides how much
Every XMR is identical to every other XMR, because nobody can trace where any of them have been. That's called fungibility, and it's the thing physical cash has that Bitcoin doesn't. A dollar bill doesn't come with a police record. Neither does an XMR.
And because the privacy is mandatory, it protects everyone. Coins where privacy is an optional setting have a problem: almost nobody flips the switch, and the few who do stand out. On Monero there is no switch. Every transaction looks like every other transaction, so every user is cover for every other user.
There's nobody to subpoena for it, either. No company runs Monero. No CEO, no foundation with a treasury, no premine the founders are sitting on. It's open-source code, run by whoever shows up — which becomes important two sections from now.
The delisting years
Regulated exchanges run on anti-money-laundering rules, including the "travel rule" — pass the sender and receiver details along with every transfer. With Monero, they can't see those details. So one by one, they decided it wasn't worth it:
- Coinbase never listed it. Not once, in twelve years.
- Binance, the biggest exchange in the world, delisted XMR spot in February 2024.
- Europe went furthest: XMR was off every EU-authorized exchange by the end of 2024, and from July 2027, new EU anti-money-laundering rules bar licensed platforms from even custodying it.
Read the headlines for three years and the conclusion wrote itself: privacy coins are being regulated out of existence. Sell, move on.
Except the price didn't get the memo.
XMR, one year of weekly closes: from ~$341 to $608 — up ~75%, through every delisting headline. Data: CoinGecko, checked Oct 26, 2026.
The numbers that matter
Checked today, Oct 26, 2026 (CoinGecko):
- Price: $608 — market cap $11.5 billion, ranked #13 in all of crypto
- Up ~75% in one year, ~9% in the last month — while Bitcoin chopped sideways around $80k
- All-time high was $798 in January 2026, so it's ~24% off the top — it has already had its run and cooled off once
- Supply: 18.8 million XMR — and its issuance rule is the most misunderstood thing about this coin, so let's do it properly (next section).
And the delistings? They moved the trading, they didn't end it. ~$144 million of XMR changed hands in the last 24 hours. Kraken, KuCoin, Bitfinex and others still run spot markets; Binance still trades XMR futures. The demand went where it was allowed to go.
The mint that never stops — and why the inflation rate still falls
Monero has no supply cap. Read that on a headline and it sounds like a printing press. Here's the actual rule: every block — roughly every 2 minutes — pays the miner exactly 0.6 XMR. Not a percentage. Not adjustable. Six-tenths of a coin, forever.
Run the arithmetic:
- 0.6 XMR × 30 blocks an hour × 24 hours = 432 new XMR a day
- × 365 = ~157,700 new XMR a year
- On today's 18.8M supply, that's ~0.84% inflation per year
Now the part the headlines skip: the numerator never grows, but the denominator never stops growing. Same 157,700 coins spread over a bigger and bigger pile means the inflation rate falls every year, forever:
| Supply | Yearly inflation |
|---|---|
| 18.8M (today) | ~0.84% |
| 25M | ~0.63% |
| 30M | ~0.53% |
| 40M | ~0.39% |
| 50M | ~0.32% |
It never reaches zero — it just keeps squeezing toward it. For scale: Bitcoin, the "hard money" coin, currently inflates at roughly 0.8% a year itself. Today the two are nearly identical. The difference is the shape of the future: Bitcoin's rate halves until issuance stops dead in 2140 (and then miners live on fees alone — an open question nobody's tested), while Monero's glides down and never stops, so there's always a guaranteed paycheck for the people securing the network.
Why keep minting at all? That paycheck is also why anyone can mine this coin on a normal computer. Monero's RandomX algorithm is deliberately built for ordinary CPUs and hostile to the warehouse ASIC machines that took over Bitcoin mining. No mining farm required — a desktop like the one in your office is a real miner. That's not a fun fact, it's load-bearing: thousands of regular people mining on regular hardware is what "decentralized" actually means in practice. There's no pool of five companies a government can call.
The risks are real, don't skip this part
- The regulatory squeeze is not imaginary. Europe's custody ban lands July 2027. The UK, EEA and Canada already can't buy XMR on Kraken. The map of where you can legally buy this coin on a big exchange is shrinking, and maps like that don't usually grow back.
- One CEO's post is not a policy. Sethi's walk-back is genuinely unusual and genuinely good news for holders — and it can be reversed by the next compliance memo. Relief rallies are the easiest rallies to give back.
- Liquidity is thinner than the big coins. A $143M daily volume is real money, but it's not Bitcoin money. Bigger spreads, faster drops when the market sneezes.
- None of this makes it cheap. Up 75% in a year and 24% off an all-time high is a coin that has already repriced the privacy story once.
Score: Legit product, bogus obituary
Monero is the rare crypto that does exactly one thing and actually does it: private digital cash. No yield, no staking APY, no points program — which, around here, is almost refreshing. The claim that failed wasn't Monero's. It was the industry's: that delisting a coin people genuinely use would kill it. Three years of delistings later it's #13 and up 75%. The exchanges didn't kill the demand. They just gave it to the exchanges that stayed.
Check it yourself: links and sources
Coin or token? Monero is a coin. It has its own blockchain, running since 2014 — it was never issued on somebody else's chain. A token lives on another project's chain; a coin has its own.
- Official website: getmonero.org
- Block explorer: xmrchain.net — you can watch blocks and transactions go by, but not amounts or balances
- Rich list (largest holders): There isn't one — and that's the point. Monero's RingCT hides amounts and balances, so nobody can publish a list of top holders. Any site claiming a Monero rich list is making it up.
- Socials: X (@monero) · Reddit (r/Monero)
- Community: Community hangouts (IRC / Matrix) · GitHub (monero-project) — there's no company, so the code repo and the chat rooms are the community
Check it yourself
- Price, market cap, supply: CoinGecko's Monero page (figures above checked Oct 26, 2026)
- The Kraken walk-back: Sethi's statements were reported Oct 23–24, 2026 by multiple crypto outlets; the quotes above are his
- EU timeline: Monero was off EU-authorized exchanges by end of 2024; the licensed-custody ban takes effect July 2027 under the EU's new AML rules
- Tail emission: Monero's 0.6 XMR/block tail emission is in the protocol docs at getmonero.org
Not financial advice. Numbers checked Oct 26, 2026 — prices move; check them again before you act on any of this.
Comments
Post a Comment