Privacy coin Monero falls by 10% after hitting year long high

The privacy coin, Monero (XMR), has fallen by 10% in the past 24 hours, from $102 to $92, according to data from metrics site CoinMarketCap.

But the coin loved and lost. Early on Friday morning, the coin peaked at $105.5, its highest price since July 2019.

It's likely that the coin was swept up in this summer's bull run. Indeed, at about $174 million, its daily volume is far higher than usual. In early June, when the crypto market was stagnant, perhaps due to the economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Monero's daily trading volume was only about $60 million and its price about $66.

This year's bull run, which started in late June, is in part a response to the coronavirus—crypto, volatile though it is, is regarded by some as a safe haven. But it's also due to the rise of DeFi, or decentralized finance: non-custodial financial products like lending protocols or synthetic stocks. Monero isn't quite the same—the privacy coin has been around since 2014 and, unlike most DeFi protocols, it doesn't run on ETH—but the increased traffic likely caused traders to throw some love its way.

Monero is a privacy coin, meaning that it's very difficult to trace. This makes the coin very popular with privacy advocates. It also makes it very popular with criminals. Just yesterday, an Israeli cybersecurity firm discovered that hackers had hidden a Monero crypto-miner in a publicly-available instance of Amazon's cloud service, Amazon Web Services.