Monero: the coin regulators keep trying to bury and can't

Monero, the coin the system wants to bury and can't

One figure sums up the paradox: in a matter of hours, someone moved $120.2 million in USDT to a Tron wallet, tried to swap it for Monero, and pushed the price up 30%. Tether froze $72 million before the exit was complete. What failed wasn't Monero, it was using a freezable asset to get in. The anecdote —recounted in the coverage of the case— explains why this coin has been in the crosshairs of governments and exchanges for years, while its community celebrates every backfired attempt as a victory.

The question hanging over everything is whether Monero will die of perfection: too private to be legal, too useful to disappear. Its privacy is mandatory at the protocol level, not optional as in Zcash or Dash, and that makes it the only asset that allows no real traceability. For better and for worse.

What is Monero and why it unsettles so many

Monero is not just another coin. While Bitcoin has become a regulated store of value —ETFs, funds, capital firms—, Monero keeps the original promise: transactions that cannot be traced. Its privacy isn't switched on, it's built in. That makes it incompatible with the model that requires identifying the origin and destination of every payment.

The result is sustained persecution. Kraken delisted it in the EU in October 2024. Major exchanges have been shutting doors one after another. And yet, the coin is still alive, trading above $400 at times and with around 30,000 daily on-chain transactions, according to the data the community works with. For comparison: Bitcoin hovers around 500,000 and Bitcoin Cash around 18,000.

Some argue that figure is misleading, that most of the movement comes from exchanges and not from people withdrawing Monero to their own wallets. The nuance matters: if the volume were real, it would show up in daily transactions. And it doesn't.

The traceability that already exists and we ignore

The most revealing case doesn't come from Monero but from Bitcoin. A user swapped Monero for Bitcoin on a no-KYC service and sent the bitcoins straight to Binance. Shortly after, they received an email: their funds would be blocked. The exchange had flagged the transaction as contaminated. It doesn't matter that it was cents: if part of the history is flagged, the entire transfer goes into quarantine.

That's what many ignore. Traceability on transparent chains is already brutal. Authorities don't need to ban Bitcoin: it's enough to flag addresses and let the exchanges do the work. Tether froze $514 million across 370 wallets in just 30 days, according to the tally circulating. Your balance isn't yours, even in a cold wallet. Neither Ledger nor Trezor can prevent a freeze.

Against that, Monero is the only one that cannot be flagged. There's no address to trace, no history to contaminate. That's why it scares them.

Can Monero be banned?

The short answer is no. The long one is that it doesn't matter. You can ban buying it with fiat, delist it from exchanges, incivil its commercial use. But you can't stop two people from exchanging Monero peer-to-peer. The question is how much of that use survives once fiat access is closed off.

The most likely scenario, according to the analysis circulating, is that Monero gets relegated to a niche: payments between individuals, the deep web, opaque transfers. A kind of digital cash for those who don't want to leave a trace. The other scenario is that the system ends up controlling every crypto payment and Monero disappears from the legal map. Both things can be true at once.

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The community can't agree on whether that's a defeat or a victory. Some see in every delisting confirmation that Monero is doing something right. Others look at the price, see the vertical rallies trinc by brutal corrections, and suspect the market matters more than ideology. Meanwhile, the coin is still there, ranked 17th by market cap, with more enemies than friends and no intention of disappearing. How long can something survive that nobody wants but everyone needs?