Monero Usage Steady Post-Delistings, Study Reveals Network Patterns

Research from TRM Labs indicates that Monero’s transaction activity has maintained stability despite delistings from several prominent cryptocurrency exchanges, which have removed the privacy-focused token from their offerings.

According to the data, the volume of transactions in both 2024 and 2025 exceeded the figures recorded prior to 2022. This persistence highlights that user demand for Monero has not diminished, even as numerous major trading venues discontinued support or imposed restrictions due to worries about transaction traceability, as detailed in the TRM Labs analysis.

Throughout 2024, leading platforms such as Binance and Kraken proceeded to delist or gradually eliminate Monero trading pairs, primarily driven by regulatory compliance pressures. The situation intensified in 2025 when authorities in Dubai prohibited privacy coins including Monero and Zcash from being traded on licensed exchanges within the Dubai International Financial Centre.

The study further points out that Bitcoin continues to dominate as the preferred currency for actual ransom payments in ransomware incidents. Although attackers frequently demand payment in Monero and occasionally provide incentives for using it, the majority of victims opt to settle in Bitcoin instead.

In contrast, trends among darknet marketplaces are shifting favorably toward Monero. The researchers observed that 48% of darknet markets launched in 2025 exclusively accepted Monero, marking a substantial rise from patterns seen in previous years, according to the report.

Monero’s Privacy Features Persist Amid Network Anomalies

Monero employs advanced cryptographic techniques to conceal the identities of senders, recipients, and transaction amounts on the blockchain. However, the investigators extended their analysis beyond the chain itself to scrutinize the underlying network protocols responsible for propagating transactions over the internet. Their examination uncovered that approximately 14% to 15% of Monero nodes exhibited atypical behaviors, including irregular timing in message dissemination and concentrations of connections on specific servers.

This unusual activity does not indicate a security breach or hack within the network. Rather, it points to the possibility that certain operators are managing clusters of interconnected nodes designed to monitor the propagation paths of transactions. In peer-to-peer systems like Monero’s, nodes that detect a transaction ahead of others could potentially infer details about its origin point.

The report emphasizes: “Even though Monero’s on-chain cryptographic protections remain intact and unaltered, the observable patterns in network-level message propagation could theoretically compromise aspects of user anonymity if external observers gain sufficient visibility.”

Monero’s Latest Upgrade Counters Potential Spy Nodes

In October 2025, the Monero project rolled out a significant software upgrade named Fluorine Fermi, version 0.18.4.3, specifically engineered to bolster user privacy and fortify overall network resilience. Key enhancements include an improved peer-selection mechanism that directs client wallets to avoid risky network segments and connect preferentially with more trustworthy nodes.

This update primarily targets threats from “spy nodes,” a concept well-known in the Monero ecosystem referring to individual nodes or coordinated groups attempting to correlate transactions with users’ IP addresses. While these spy nodes cannot decrypt Monero’s core privacy protections, they might exploit observations of transaction routing patterns across the network to gather intelligence.

Discussions surrounding potential network-level privacy vulnerabilities have circulated within the community for several years. These concerns escalated notably following the leak of a 2024 video that implied law enforcement agencies could deploy their own nodes to surveil activities, igniting widespread conversations across the cryptocurrency space about the limits of privacy coin defenses.