Monero Crypto Becomes The Top Gainer This Week After Pushing To A New All-time-High

Key Insights:

• The 40% plus weekly rally in Monero (XMR) crypto price propels it to a new historic top.
• Monero eyes the top 10 spot by market cap, and could be on track to dethrone Cardano.
• A look at the correlation between Monero’s rally and gold or silver price action.

The last 7 days have been quite interesting for the Monero crypto and its community. This is because the privacy coin achieved an unexpected parabolic move.

XMR price was up 51% in the last 7 days. This effectively made it the best-performing cryptocurrency this week, among the top 50 coins by market cap.

Monero crypto traded as low as $450 on Friday last week. It rallied as high as $799 on Wednesday, marking a new ATH. This was equivalent to a 77% rally, but the price has since retreated to $701 at press time.

The slight retracement occurred while XMR price was deep in overbought territory. Nevertheless, the privacy coin managed to surpass Bitcoin Cash and Chainlink to secure the 11th spot in the list of top coins by market cap.

Monero is now eying the top 10, and more upside could potentially allow it to dethrone Cardano.

Is Monero Crypto the New Digital Gold?

XMR’s rally has been taking place while most of the top cryptocurrencies struggled to maintain bullish momentum. In fact, some, including Bitcoin, have been struggling to push their weekly gains past 5%.

More importantly, Monero crypto price action was more in tune with gold and silver. The two precious metals achieved impressive bullish price action this week that propelled them to new historic highs.

This may indicate that the XMR price upside was a reflection of how the market has been treating the privacy coin. In other words, the demand surge signals that Monero’s privacy and limited access align with safe-haven asset characteristics.

XRM jumped back on top as the leading privacy coin after Zcash’s developer exit, which watered down previous confidence. ZEC was only up by a modest 7% this week, which underscored lower demand.

Interestingly, the latest LunarCrush privacy coins ranking by social mentions revealed that Monero was third, after Zcash and Litecoin.

XMR Demand Drivers and Major Liquidation Event this Week

The Monero crypto rally may have stemmed from a combination of factors. Zcash woes may have fueled heavy migration into XMR.

Moreover, privacy concerns have been pushing investors to embrace privacy coins, and Monero was in a position to reap the benefits given its first-mover advantage and leading position.

These observations suggest that the privacy coin narrative could be one of the top narratives of 2026. Meanwhile, demand dynamics also triggered some interesting shifts this week.

For example, XMR may have just experienced its highest daily short liquidation event in recent history. Roughly $3.9 million worth of XMR shorts were liquidated on Tuesday, giving rise to a short squeeze that bolstered its push to new highs.

Interestingly, XMR recorded over $5.7 million in net outflows on Tuesday. This was the highest daily net outflow that the privacy coin has experienced in the last 12 months.

The sell pressure was likely fueled by profit-taking since the cryptocurrency was deep in overbought territory at the time. These outflows highlighted bearish expectations, and they mirrored rising shorts in the derivatives market.

Speaking of, Monero crypto just achieved a record high open interest at $278 million. This means Monero crypto will likely experience more volatile moves ahead as derivatives interest in the coin rises.