The privacy-centric crypto asset monero has seen significant gains during the last two weeks, jumping 36% in value against the U.S. dollar. Despite the negative press from the “Spider-Man: No Way Home” torrents with monero mining malware, seven-day statistics indicate the crypto asset has gained more than 21%.
Monero sees double-digit gains amid mining malware headlines
The privacy-focused monero digital currency (XMR) saw double-digit gains this week, as much of the crypto economy suffered losses and experienced a period of consolidation. Just recently, XMR made headlines after a cybersecurity firm warned that torrent files containing the movie “Spider-Man: No Way Home” could contain monero mining malware.
Mining malware reports have plagued the Monero community for years as some applications exist which hijack a victim’s CPU, and then mine monero without the victim knowing. The act is sometimes referred to as “cryptojacking.”
Since the start of the year, the monero (XMR) has gained 58% against the US dollar and the crypto asset has a market cap of around $ 4.4 billion, ranked 44th out of 12,135 crypto assets. XMR represents 0.19% of the $ 2.3 trillion crypto-economy as of January 1, 2022.
XMR has a 24-hour price range of around $227.51 to $248.45 per unit and tether (USDT) is the asset’s biggest trading pair with 42% of all trades. This is followed by BTC (18.39%), ETH (7.83%), USD (5.94%), EUR (3.35%), GBP (2.32%), and JPY (2.32%).
Monero (XMR) is an open source digital currency network based on Cryptonote technology created by Nicolas van Saberhagen in 2013. The blockchain network is said to be obscured, but blockchain monitoring company Ciphertrace claims to have monero tracing capabilities.
The project’s privacy techniques include IP address obscuring, ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, bulletproofs, and stealth addresses. At the end of August 2021, a Monero developer announced BTC to XMR atomic swap capabilities. Additionally, monero (XMR) is leveraged on a number of darknet marketplaces.
Monero also faces many private coin competitors such as horizen (ZEN), dash (DASH) and zcash (ZEC). The ZEN, for example, has gained 438% year-to-date against the US dollar and the ZEC has risen 130.8% last year.
