Monero bypasses crypto market outage, but XMR price still risks a 20% drop in June

Monero (XMR) has shown surprising resilience to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive policies that pushed the prices of most of its crypto rivals — including top dog Bitcoin (BTC) — down last week.

The price of XMR closed 2.37% higher at $217 last week, data from Binance shows. In comparison, BTC, which typically affects the broader crypto market, ended the week at 11.55%. The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), also plunged 11% over the same period.

While the crypto market wiped out $163.25 billion of its valuation last week, down nearly 9%, Monero’s market cap jumped $87.7 million, suggesting that many traders decided to seek safety in this privacy-focused coin. .

XMR Near Critical Support

Monero kicked off the new week with a sale, with XMR falling nearly 4% to around $208 on May 9.

The drop brought the token near its key support level – the 50-week exponential moving average (50-day EMA; the red wave in the chart below) near $214. The wave also coincides with another price floor. – the 0.618 Fib line of the Fibonacci retracement chart pulled from the $38 swing low to the $491 swing low.

Interestingly, XMR’s price decline is part of a pullback move that started on April 21 from around $290. In turn, the reversal to the downside surfaced amid a breakout of a falling wedge whose upward target is around USD 490 will be located.

That could result in one of these two outcomes: XMR breaks below its support confluence around $214 to test the wedge’s upper trendline as support (which also coincides with the token’s 200-week EMA near $161). 50); OR the token will bounce back from the support confluence and continue its movement towards the wedge’s technical upward target near $490.

The general trend of the crypto market seems biased towards bears in an environment of higher interest rates. This, coupled with Monero’s erratic but consistent positive correlation with Bitcoin, could eventually weigh XMR lower, falling to the top of the wedge at around $160 in the second quarter, about 20% lower than its current price.

Strong XMR Fundamentals

XMR’s bearish setup could see a period of price spikes as Monero moves closer to its preliminary hard fork, slated for July 16.

Related: Making Crypto Conventional by Improving Global Crypto Crime Investigation

According to Monero’s GitHub post, a testnet version of the same technical upgrade is expected on May 16. The team behind the project confirmed that the hard fork would improve Monero’s network security while reducing costs.

#monero has a network upgrade (hardfork) on July 16, 2022 at block 2668888.

Privacy and performance are improved!

The update includes:
Ring sizes increase from 11 to 16 View tags to speed up wallet/node sync
Multisig Solutions
Bulletproof+
+more!#xmr $xmr pic.twitter.com/jZ5ouk1uqo

— John Foss (@johnfoss69) April 17, 2022

Meanwhile, demand for Monero is expected to increase in 2022 due to its promise to provide anonymity. For example, XMR emerged as a crypto of choice among ransomware attackers, with a CipherTrade study showing a 500% increase in the use of the token by 2021.

The views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risks, you should do your own research when making a decision.