Why Half of New Darknet Markets Only Accept This Crypto
Monero’s rise isn’t a scandal; it’s proof that privacy-focused crypto works as intended. As darknet markets increasingly go XMR-only, the chain’s future promises near-perfect opacity, complicating investigations and challenging regulators.
In early January, hackers drained over $200 million from a crypto wallet and immediately swapped the loot into Monero. Within four days, Monero's price jumped nearly 60% to a record high, driven partly by the buying pressure as stolen funds flooded in. For Monero's devoted community, this wasn't a scandal. It was validation that the system works exactly as designed.
New research from blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reveals a dramatic shift in darknet market behavior: 48% of darknet markets launched in 2025 accepted only Monero, nearly triple the share from three years earlier. This "continued structural shift toward XMR-only markets" is especially pronounced in Western-facing platforms, where privacy coins appear to be a direct response to improved tracing capabilities on Bitcoin and stablecoins.
The numbers tell a striking story. Despite facing delistings from major exchanges over recent years (Binance and Coinbase delisted Monero, while Kraken, KuCoin, and MEXC remain among the largest exchanges still listing it), transaction volumes in 2024 and 2025 were significantly higher than in the 2020-2021 period. Monero's price volatility is now roughly 2.5 times higher than Bitcoin due to thin liquidity and fragmented markets, yet usage hasn't contracted. This suggests demand isn't driven by casual trading but by users deliberately seeking Monero's privacy features and willing to accept higher friction to get them.
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But that's about to get exponentially harder. A planned upgrade introduces "full-chain membership proofs," effectively increasing possible recipients from 16 to millions. According to Paul Sibenik, CEO of CryptoForensic Investigators, this change makes untangling transactions "more or less pointless." While Bitcoin and operates like glass houses where every transaction is visible, Monero is moving toward near-perfect opacity.
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This raises an obvious question: why Monero and not Zcash? Venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan recently claimed on a podcast that the future was "Zcash or Communism," positioning Zcash as the privacy solution. Yet darknet markets have decisively chosen Monero. The difference appears to be usage patterns and defaults. Zcash offers optional privacy through "shielded" transactions, but only 30% of Zcash is currently shielded, showing that privacy isn't the default setting. Recently Cake Wallet did Zcash a huge favor by adding shielded Zcash by default. Monero's privacy is and always has been mandatory and built into every transaction. For darknet operators, optional privacy isn't privacy at all.
TRM Labs' research also reveals network-level vulnerabilities that complicate Monero's privacy guarantees. Around 14 to 15% of reachable peers in the Monero network exhibited non-standard behavior: irregular timing patterns, unusual handshakes, and concentrated infrastructure that suggests surveillance attempts. While Monero's on-chain cryptography remains intact, these network dynamics can introduce structural visibility that affects theoretical anonymity models used in investigations.
The tension is philosophical as much as technical. As Wall Street moves into crypto ($86 billion in Bitcoin now sits in ETFs managed by firms like BlackRock), the industry's libertarian origins feel increasingly distant. Tether, issuer of the USDT stablecoin, has frozen $4 billion in wallets tied to illicit activity and worked with law enforcement on over 2,000 cases. Blockchain analytics firms like TRM and Chainalysis work closely with authorities to trace criminal crypto flows.
Monero represents the opposite trajectory. Ari Redbord, TRM's head of policy, acknowledges the dilemma: "The challenge is how do we enable lawful users to have privacy and yet stop bad actors from abusing privacy enhancing technology?" This is where the problem lies. As with mathematics, you can't have it both ways. Either you have privacy for all or none at all.
With the upcoming upgrade locking in technical advantages that law enforcement can't reverse and darknet markets voting with their wallets, that question may already have its answer. Unlike centralized platforms, there's no CEO to pressure, no servers to seize, no company to sanction. This is what crypto's original vision actually looks like, for better or worse.
