Monero (XMR) price dropped by nearly 10% three days after establishing a week-to-date high of around $290 on April 24. Nonetheless, several technical indicators suggest that the XMR/USD pair is poised to resume its uptrend over the next few months. Falling wedge breakout underway Notably, XMR’s price broke out of its “falling wedge” structure in late March. It continued its move upside in the later daily sessions, with rising volumes indicating bullish sentiment among Monero traders. Traditional analysts consider falling wedges as bullish reversal patterns, or the price first consolidates within a contracting descending channel, followed by a strong bounce …

Metaverse skeptics fear the prospect of unprotected data and large-scale user surveillance on a scale never seen before. Ironically, the largest company pushing the Metaverse, Meta (previously known as Facebook), has faced its own fair share of privacy scandals in the internet’s current iteration, culminating in Mark Zuckerberg being infamously hauled before the United States Congress to answer for Facebook's inability to combat hate speech and data privacy violations. In a U.S. Senate committee hearing, whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Meta of prioritizing “profit over the well-being of children and all users” when it came to creating manipulative algorithms that tap …

Major crypto exchange Binance challenged the accuracy of a report, which stated one of its regional heads agreed to supply Russia's financial intelligence unit with customer data potentially related to donations for anti-corruption and anti-Putin activist Alexei Navalny. Reuters reported on Friday that Binance's head of Eastern Europe and Russia Gleb Kostarev met with officials from Russia's Rosfinmonitoring, a financial monitoring service linked to the country's Federal Security Service, or FSB, in April 2021. Kostarev reportedly agreed to a request from the government body to turn over certain user data — including names and addresses — later telling an associate …

As told by Monero (XMR) developers over the weekend, on July 16, the Monero network passed a community consensus to initiate a mainnet hard fork at block height 2,668,888. The popular privacy coin's hard fork will include increasing the chain's ring size from 11 to 16, adding view tags to outputs to reduce wallet scanning time, introducing bulletproofs and implementing fee changes. Raising the number of ring signatures is meant to ensure that transactions have a larger anonymity set, making it harder to reverse engineer the sources of a transaction. One developer pointed out that view tags could reduce network …

On Friday, Tornado Cash announced that it was using oracle contracts from Chainalysis to block wallet addresses sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. The move comes after the U.S. Department of the Treasury linked North Korean cybercriminal Lazarus Group as an alleged perpetrator for the recent $600 million+ Ronin Bridge exploit. As told by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, the hackers have sent approximately $80.3 million worth of Ether (ETH) through Tornado Cash. "Maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom; however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance," said the Tornado Cash …

Cryptocurrency mixers have been an interesting topic of discussion ever since the advent of cryptocurrencies and their adoption by retail investors around the world. Cryptocurrency mixers are services that essentially focus on one feature of a blockchain network: privacy. Cryptocurrency mixers, also known as tumblers, provide anonymity so no one can trace the sender or receiver of a transaction. This can help protect the identity of individuals who want to be completely anonymous and non-traceable. How cryptocurrency mixers work is that they break down the funds sent using the mixer and scramble them with other transactions. They break the link …

Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) rallied by nearly 9.5% in the past week compared with the crypto market's decline of 8.5% in the same period. What's more, the XMR/USD pair has broken above a strong, multi-month resistance trendline, hinting at more upside ahead. XMR price action XMR's price was down by a modest 0.87% on April 10 from its two-month-high of $245 established a day before. However, the cryptocurrency still outperformed its top rivals, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), on a weekly timeframe. Speculations about entities using Monero to bypass sanctions could have boosted its appeal among investors. Meanwhile, The …

Last week, the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) voted in favor of a regulatory update that could compromise the exchange platforms’ ability to deal with noncustodial crypto wallets. Should the regulatory project make it to the legislation phase in the upcoming months, it would place severe disclosure requirements on transactions between noncustodial wallets and crypto exchanges in the European Union — a process whose signs are visible in other parts of the globe as well. What happened On Thursday, March 31, ECON and LIBE members …

Layer-two Ethereum scaling solution, Polygon has announced the establishment of Polygon ID, an identity platform designed to complement the decentralized finance and decentralized application (dApp) economies by providing users greater privacy and sovereignty within Web3. Professed to be the first identity platform of its kind to adopt cryptographic-based zero-knowledge technology, the platform will utilize Iden3’s Circom ZK toolkit, including zkSNARK cryptography for generation and the zkProof Request Language protocol to verify authenticity of the proposed claim. Users of the platform can provide proof of their identity when engaging in activities such as initial coin offerings, token airdrops, decentralized exchange, or …

Recent weeks saw a massive surge of the so-called privacy coins’ prices — namely Monero (XMR), Dash (DASH), Zcash (ZEC) and Haven Protocol (XHV). As many other cryptocurrencies and the industry at large faced immense regulatory pressure amid the war in Ukraine, one narrative that began taking hold in the crypto space was the potential of such privacy-enhancing assets to provide investors a greater level of financial anonymity. But, can privacy coins deliver on Bitcoin’s (BTC) original promise? A good month for privacy-focused assets Over the past month, Monero has almost doubled its tally. With some minor oscillations, it rose …

Jake Chervinsky, head of policy at crypto advocacy group the Blockchain Association, said the United States should be careful to avoid a “totalitarian nightmare” in its potential launch of a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. Speaking at Austin’s SXSW festival on Tuesday in a panel on ‘Financial Surveillance in a Cashless Society’, Chervinsky said though U.S. President Joe Biden had issued an executive order establishing a national strategy for cryptocurrencies in the United States, there were potential privacy concerns over the country launching a CBDC. Empowering a government to surveil its citizens using a CBDC, “sounds like the kind …

After Bitcoin (BTC) faced its third consecutive rejection, investors became more confident in adding altcoin positions. For the leading cryptocurrency, the path to $50,000 appears more challenging than previously expected. According to Euronews Next, on March 14, the European Union rejected a proposed rule that could have banned the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) mining algorithm used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Several EU parliamentarians have been pushing to ban PoW mining over energy concerns. In terms of performance, the aggregate market capitalization of all cryptos was relatively flat over the past seven days, registering a modest 0.4% gain to $1.77 trillion. …