According to the latest rumor, some Asian darknet overlords are responsible.
They have billions in non-fungible digital money, and they are moving it into Monero because the Alphabet boys came down on them.
Haowang Guarantee was larger than the Silk Road, larger than Hydra, just the “largest illicit online marketplace to have ever operated”, with $27 Billion of transactions since launching in 2021.
had the same thoughts after seeing the reddit thread for it as well:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1ks7a1o/worlds_largest_darknet_market_take_down_40b/that links to that article with slighty different numbers but still in about the same ballpark:
https://www.elliptic.co/blog/elliptic-data-telegram-market-takedown
back in april there was also the whole “3520” BTC ($330M at the time) that been “social engineered to some US boomer by some somalian in the UK”, still waiting on more news regarding if any arrest been made since they allegedly identified the “thefts”?
that was what started the pump since alot of those been transfered to XMR through instant swap exchanges
and more recently the coinbase hack that their customer service been bribed to leak customers accounts, also about $300M worth stollen but only seen reports of the troll $42.5M transaction transaction to ETH with the “L bozo <youtube link>” message:
https://xcancel.com/officer_cia/status/1925341673879445757
so havent seen report on those getting transfered to XMR but maybe some have been slowly?
but for that chinese market, it’s actually a fuck ton of users in the $bilions so guessing it’ll definitely have an impact on that buy pressure overtime as well as the short term