Overnight from Sunday to Monday, Monero’s XMR reached a new all-time high (ATH) of nearly $600. What explains this surge?
Monero’s XMR Breaks Its All-Time High
On Sunday, the price of Monero’s XMR soared, to the point that overnight, the asset surpassed its all-time high (ATH) to reach $596.61 per unit.
Despite a slight decline, the asset is still trading at over $565 at the time of writing, up 17.8% over the past 24 hours.
Going forward, price action will be particularly interesting to watch to see how XMR performs relative to its previous highs. Indeed, the monthly chart shows that the May 2021 ATH of nearly $518 had only just managed to surpass the December 2017 high of $469.5. Subsequently, the asset underwent a sharp correction amid a global trend of regulators increasingly taking a stance against anonymous cryptocurrencies, but the price eventually began to rise again starting in the spring of 2024:
XMR price (monthly data)
To understand the reasons behind this rise, we need to look at the collapse experienced by Zcash’s ZEC last week, following the resignation of its development team, which ultimately launched a new project.
While ZEC has recovered somewhat since then, it is still down 20% year-to-date, and this shift toward XMR has allowed the latter to reclaim the top spot in the privacy coin category. In fact, XMR now has a market capitalization of over $10.5 billion, compared to $6.83 billion for ZEC.
Beyond this momentum, we note that XMR’s surge is part of an uptrend that has lasted nearly two years, making XMR one of the few altcoins to have stood out even slightly in 2025. As privacy concerns grow increasingly acute—whether due to the implementation of DAC8 in Europe or cryptocurrency-related kidnappings in France—we will see to what extent this impacts XMR’s price in the longer term.
