There is something that is distinguished by the suspect transfer of Monday of more than 3,520 BTC ($ 330.7 million) to the MONERO confidentiality part (XMR), a conversion that the detective Blockchain Zachxbt was probably linked to a hack: a coordinated activity on the derivative market.
Monero, which obscures the addresses of the sender and the recipient to provide an impossible currency, has a limited liquidity on exchanges, which makes it more difficult for users to transform without affecting the market and exposes them to shift, the risk of price change for the worst before the finalization of the agreement.
The decision to go through a non-liquid cryptocurrency is unusual. The USDT or Ether (ETH) of Tether would have provided an easier and less fine way to move the funds, and mixers such as Tornado Cash could help obscure the transaction path. Of course, stablecoins like the USDT are also easier to intercept and freeze.
Trade data suggests, however, that it was more than just someone who tries to whiten stolen funds.
The pirate possible most likely encountered a shift during the transaction. The combined depth of the market, which measures the liquidity of the command book on a given price range, was relatively low to around $ 1 million per 2% on both sides of the book. XRM jumped 45% due to limited liquidity on the scholarships, which means that they could have lost up to 20% – $ 66 million – by buying XMR rather than a more liquid token.
For a more complete photo, take a look at the derivative markets. While Monero increased, the interests open – the number of term contracts and current options – in XMR on the main centralized exchanges more than doubled at $ 35.1 million, according to Coinyze.
A 45% increase in XMR prices should have increased interests open to $ 24.2 million instead of the figure in which it found itself. Given the million dollars in liquidations, someone or some people, was already long on XMR up to $ 11 million.
Although the increase in prices of this outfit would not have compensated for the total quantity of slipping, this would help soften the blow. In addition, the figure does not take into account the positions that could have existed in decentralized exchanges, and let us not forget that the funds were probably stolen first, therefore the (supposed) authors are still a few million dollars in advance.
This is not the first time that bad players have flooded points purchases to move the derived needle. Last month, a merchant manipulated the prices of jelly on the decentralized exchange hyperliquid. They bought jelly on illiquid exchanges, deceiving the pricing oracle to feed an inaccurate price with hyperliquid and thus generate profits for long position holders.
Both cases establish similarities with the feat of $ 114 million on the mango markets in 2022, which involved a merchant named Avi Eisenberg manipulating the MNGO prices by using assets using poorly acquired gains. Eisenberg was found guilty by a jury in 2024 and risks 20 years in prison.
