- Monero adoption is on the rise with a new report showing that it is the eighth-most used coin in merchant purchases.
- The privacy-centric cryptocurrency has long been misunderstood as being used for illegal activities.
As the cryptocurrency industry shakes off yesterday’s Tesla news on Bitcoin, the Monero community is celebrating a landmark achievement. According to Cryptwerk, the coin’s popularity has thrived in the last few years. In May, the platform saw the coin’s popularity rise by 31 percent.
Cryptwerk is an online directory of companies, websites, shops, and services where users can pay using cryptocurrencies. It has around 25 cryptocurrencies listed. Unsurprisingly, the most popular coins are Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC). Monero, however, has been a rising star. In 2018, there were only 41 merchants accepting Monero on Cryptwerk. Now, it has over 950 merchants accepting the digital asset. This has made it the eighth most popular cryptocurrency on the platform.
One of the reasons that boosted the turnaround is a better understanding of Monero. The digital asset was in the past shunned for the privacy-centric design that associated it with illegal activities. Monero holders were reckoned to be involved with some sort of illegal activities such as buying illegal drugs.
But this is not the case, while there are those taking advantage of the technology to hide their illegal activities, the feature aims to offer privacy to senders and receivers of the coin. In the modern age, where privacy is violated by most technologies, Monero aims to offer different levels of privacy, hiding transaction wallets and balances.
Monero transactions more than double
A further breakdown of the crypto directory’s data shows that Monero is most popular in the US. Of the total, 25 percent of the merchants are located in the US. Russia is also on the rise with a 10 percent share making it the second-highest nation.
The growth in merchant adoption has been backed by growth in year-to-year transactions. According to a blog post by Monero that reflected on its performance this year, transactions grew from 10,000tx per day to 23,000tx per day. In total, Monero has recorded 5,868,096 transactions between April 2020 and April this year. Monero’s on-chain usage grew by 202 percent in the same time frame. This data supports Monero’s growth despite the digital asset losing its place among the top-ranked coins. It is evident that Monero remains the most popular private coin in the market.
Monero has a market cap of roughly $7.3B at the time of press. Sitting at the 27th position, the digital asset has seen little change in the last 24 hours. However, it has been on a steady decline, losing around 15 percent in the last 7 days.
Above $407, the token has retraced by more than 20% from the set ATH reached last week. Holders are looking to reaccumulate at current highs before making another upswing move.
