Monero more than sextuples in a little over a month

The total value of all monero in circulation has more than sextupled in a little over a month. The altcoin, which was launched in April 2014, using ticker “XMR,” is trading for a little more than $12.50 at the time of this writing.

According to coincap.io, monero is ranked 5th in terms of overall market value, with a market cap around $153,432,219 at the time of this writing.

The market cap is up from approximately $25 million at the end of July, reports Bloomberg.

The news website also says that the spike is the result of the “support from prominent websites that anonymously peddle drugs,” giving example of one of the most popular websites for buying drugs like hybrid cannabis and liquid LSD, AlphaBay, which announced in late August that monero would be accepted as payment starting September 1.

The altcoin offers more privacy by mixing multiple transactions together on the blockchain to make it more difficult to trace the origin of the funds, in addition to adopting “dual-key stealth” addresses, which make it hard for third parties to find out who received the funds.

It should be noted here that bitcoin also lets users move funds pseudo-anonymously, but news of the law enforcement agencies working to increase their abilities to track transactions across the blockchain and link funds to the bank accounts that are eventually used to convert bitcoin to and from fiat currencies like U.S. dollars have very likely contributed to the rise in the number of monero users.

Image via Monero’s website