Monero Spikes 50% After Being Used to Launder $330 Million of Potentially Stolen Bitcoin

Early Monday, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT identified a “suspicious transfer” of 3,520 BTC to a new address, suggesting a potential theft.

The Bitcoin, valued at $330.7 million, was moved from the potential victim’s wallet to a unique address, he noted on X, formerly Twitter. Zach added that “shortly after, the funds began to be laundered through more than six instant exchanges and were swapped for XMR.”

This massive inflow led to Monero’s (XMR) price spiking by 50%. At the time of publishing, XMR is trading at $261.10, up 14% in the past 24 hours and up 21% over the last week. It currently boasts a market cap of around $4.7 billion, according to CoinGecko.

According to a second tweet by ZachXBT, the nature of the transactions strongly suggest theft based on a number of factors: “That’s how you know it’s likely a theft… longtime Bitcoin holder, is a Gemini, River, Coinbase, etc. user, $330M suddenly moved today and transferred in small increments to instant exchanges, creating hundreds of orders. Gonna lose multiple 7 figs to fees [slash] inefficient for a normal person to buy like this.”

The incident has reignited an ongoing debate over crypto privacy tools and the prevalence of money laundering in the sector.

According to a 2025 report by Chainalysis, approximately $40 billion was received by illicit cryptocurrency addresses in 2024, with the figure estimated to be as high as $51.3 billion. "A year from now, these totals will be higher, as we identify more illicit addresses and incorporate their historic activity into our estimates," the report stated.