Privacy coin Monero pumps 31% amid US taxation plans

Coinciding with news that United States President Joe Biden’s proposed tax plan would require tax reporting on business transactions exceeding $10,000, the value of privacy coin Monero (XMR) climbed 31% on Friday.

Biden’s American Families tax plan would require exchanges and custodians to implement tighter reporting measures to help detect tax evasion and money laundering. Banks and financial institutions would also be required to report account inflow/outflow information to the Internal Revenue Service to help uncover unreported income.

The Treasury Department’s agenda which was published on Thursday stated that cryptocurrency business activity remained relatively small, but was expected to increase in the next decade.

“Despite constituting a relatively small portion of business income today, cryptocurrency transactions are likely to rise in importance in the next decade, especially in the presence of a broad-based financial account reporting regime,” stated the report.

Just over 24 hours later, Monero led the charts among the cryptocurrency market cap top 100 with 31% growth. The coin price climbed from $230 to $304 overnight, adding to a now 84% rebound since Monero sank to a three-month low of $165 during Wednesday’s market crash.

Supplemental technologies now exist which can anonymize the transactions of many well-known cryptocurrencies, but Monero remains one of the few coins focused solely on privacy and is the largest of its kind by market cap.

Launched in 2014, Monero has since gone on to become a currency of choice on the drug markets of the dark web, replacing more well-known coins such as Bitcoin (BTC) in recent years. Blockchain analysis poses a threat to anyone using Bitcoin on the dark web, from drug dealers to anonymous journalists. Monero transactions cannot be traced in the same way. The technology has drawn the attention of government agencies worldwide, many of whom have offered bounties to anyone who can make the opaque cryptocurrency transparent.

Google Trends data shows that Monero search interest increased by close to 1,000% in the past year, as the coin price rose 1,300% from March 2020’s valuation of $34. Despite the surge in interest, historic search queries remain a quarter of what they were in December 2017, when Monero’s presence in the market cap top ten gave it a more visible position in the cryptocurrency shop window.