Monero Jumps After $23M Mystery Buy; Zcash Pulls Back

Monero (XMR) rose 11% to $396.75 after on-chain records showed a single wallet withdrew $29.3 million in USDC from Coinbase, swapped portions into DAI and routed about $23 million into Monero through the Wagyu over-the-counter venue using multiple wallets. An on-chain analyst posted, ‘Between 17 and 4 hours ago, they purchased $23M worth of $XMR, pushing the price up nearly 15% in the process.’ There has been no public confirmation that the funds were stolen or compromised; the origin of the capital has not been verified.

Large, opaque purchases have previously triggered short-term rallies in Monero. On-chain analysts are monitoring wallet flows and OTC venues for similar activity.

Zcash (ZEC) fell more than 6% to $520.05 after trading above $640 earlier in May, a level last seen in 2017. ZEC remains up about 57% over the past 30 days and more than 900% year-on-year. The recent advance followed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s January closure of its probe into the Zcash Foundation without enforcement action, a May position disclosure by Multicoin Capital, and Grayscale’s filing to convert its Zcash Trust into a spot exchange-traded product.

About 30% of ZEC’s supply is held in the network’s shielded pools, which reduces the effective circulating float. The pullback brought ZEC back to its 200-day moving average near $500, a technical level some traders use as a reference for direction.

Monero’s market capitalization is roughly $7.43 billion and Zcash’s is about $8.67 billion, placing them a couple of ranks apart on major coin tables. The price divergence has reopened debate within the privacy-coin community over design trade-offs: Monero applies privacy by default with RingCT signatures and stealth addresses that obfuscate sender, receiver and amounts on every transaction, while Zcash uses zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proofs to enable private transactions that users must opt into. Many Zcash transactions continue to occur on the transparent layer.

Market participants are watching regulatory developments, on-chain flows, shielded-supply figures and moving averages to assess whether capital rotates between ZEC’s institutional narrative and XMR’s default-privacy design.