Monero prices rocket to $438 amid $120 million onchain laundering maze

Someone routed $120 million in stablecoins through a chain of swaps this week, and a sudden jump in the Monero price made it visible.

Onchain investigator ZachXBT said in a Telegram broadcast earlier Friday that an address received 120.2 million USDT on the Tron network on Thursday. USDT is the largest stablecoin, a crypto token built to hold a steady $1 value, and Tron is a blockchain often used to move it cheaply.

The entity then began splitting the money up and sending it in different directions.

Some of it went into Monero (XMR), a privacy coin designed to hide who sends and receives funds, which makes it hard to trace. The buy orders were large enough to move the market, and ZachXBT said these orders pushed Monero from about $330 to $420.

The token hit an intraday high near $438 and traded around $382 on Friday, up about 8% on the day. Monero does not trade in large volumes, so a single big buy can swing the price fast.

The rest was scattered. ZachXBT traced more than $12 million to deposit addresses at the KuCoin exchange and about $8 million to instant swap services, which convert one coin into another quickly and often without identity checks.

Another $8 million was moved off Tron onto the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks through Near Intents, a cross-chain swap tool. Spreading funds across coins, exchanges and blockchains is a common way to break the trail.

Then Tether stepped in. The company can freeze USDT held at a specific address, and ZachXBT said it blacklisted an address tied to the entity holding 72 million USDT. Once frozen, those tokens cannot be moved or cashed out.

It is unclear where the $120 million originally came from. But the pattern, fast movement into a privacy coin, instant swaps and cross-chain hops, is the kind used to launder illicit funds, and Tether's freeze suggests it reached the same conclusion.